St Wossname's Fire
by SpamWarrior
Summary: The Auditors have resurrected Mister Teatime and given him a mission: kill Life and end existence. Features just about everyone who's ever been in a Discworld book for more than two pages. PHEER, I tell you.
1. It Begins

Summary: The Auditors believe they have found the perfect way to destroy the world, starting with its supposedly intelligent creatures, but, like all their plans, it doesn't quite work the way they intend. The resultant mess drags in just about everyone who's ever wandered through a Discworld book, as they all race to save the world from the lunatic in whose hands its fate has been placed. Pheer, I tell you, PHEER.

———

Perpetrator's Note: Discworld, alas, does not belong to me, nor do any of its inhabitants. This is merely an absurd idea that wormed its way into my head, and wouldn't get out until I wrote it down. I've taken some liberties as regards the Auditors—I'm fairly sure they all died at the end of _Thief of Time—_but they're necessary to the plot. I make no money off of this, so please don't sue me—all you'll get is an ancient, wheezing Geo and the few packets of ketchup at the bottom of my refrigerator.

Life, as anyone with any practical experience can attest to, is as impossible to eradicate as a really good cockroach infestation. It's too tenacious, too stubborn, too adaptable to ever be fully quashed—blow the world up with a nuclear bomb, and within a decade you'll get flowers with horns and eight-eyed slugs. Life is everywhere, like it or not, and there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Nevertheless, there are those who would try. They call themselves (when they refer to themselves at all) the Auditors, and it is their singular driving ambition to see all life wiped out, preferably starting with humanity and its related sapient species.

Three of the little grey creatures now hovered over the great flat circle of the Disc, watching in silence.

At length one spoke, and said, _It has been proven we cannot destroy humanity. Humanity must be made to destroy itself._

_How? _a second asked. _It has also been proven that humanity is the most stubborn of all life forms. There are none upon the Disc mad enough to undertake such an action._

And the third made a noise that might have passed for a laugh. _None _living, it said. _We have made a search of those who have gone, and found one that we believe may well be capable of—and willing—to bring about the end of the world._

The second looked quizzical, if an empty grey robe can be said to look quizzical. _Indeed? _it asked.

_Indeed, _affirmed the third_. It is the dead who will destroy the living. Which is, if you think about it, how it should be._

There was a pause. _You said 'you'_, the first robe said.

_Well, yes, but it was a 'you' in the metaphorical sense, not in the sense of 'you' in personal. I would never—oh, hell._

There was a brief burst of blue flame, and the robe dissolved into smoke.

_Well, the first said at last. Now that that's taken care of, let us see to the first stage of our plan._

———

Being dead was not at all what he had thought it would be. Of course, he'd never given any thought to what it would be like to _be_ dead, and since he had given nothing, nothing was exactly what he got. He was, to the best of his knowledge, Nowhere—not in space, not in heaven or hell or that weird place the Crocodile God priests talked of; he was...nowhere. Surrounded by blank whiteness, with neither up nor down, hot or cold...nothing. Really, being dead was dead boring.

He didn't know how long he'd been dead, since there was no time in this place, but it felt like forever. The world had been such a _fun _place, and this...this was worse than oblivion, because he was still fully conscious. He had no form, no body to speak of, but he was fully aware, and bored out of his mind.

It was into this seemingly endless boredom that three grey robes popped, quite suddenly, without a sound. They hovered before what passed for his sight in the blankness, fluttering slightly in spite of the lack of wind.

_We have an offer for you, _one said, or rather, seemed to say—he heard no words, but he registered them nonetheless.

"Yes?" he said, or tried to say, though having no vocal cords made this rather difficult.

_Yes_, it said. _We will allow you to return to the world, so long as you promise to do us a...favor._

"What sort of a favor?" He hadn't been used to doing favors when he was alive, but death was so dull he'd do almost anything to get out of it.

_We will give you a kingdom_, the robe said, _a powerful kingdom, with minions at your beck and call, and..._

"...And?" he prompted.

_...And we want you to do what you will with it._

If he'd had a body, he would have blinked—that wasn't what he'd expected, though really, he hadn't known what to expect. "That doesn't sound like much of a favor. What do _you_ get out of it?"

He had a sense that one of the robes was grinning. _We will see_, it said. _We will see._

He considered it for perhaps half a second. "Deal," he said happily.

It happened in a flash—one minute he was lost in Nothingness, without form and void, and the next he was standing on thick green meadow-grass, small flowers waving about his bare feet, an endless blue sky stretching above the jagged edges of mountains that marched off to the end of his vision.

He looked at his hands—how strange, to have hands again—and at his feet, and at all the vastness of the world around him. And he laughed.

The three grey robes had followed him, hovering over the impossible green of the meadow. They regarded him in silence a moment, and then one said_, Welcome back, Mister Teatime._


	2. In Which Everything Slowly Starts to Unr...

Perpetrator's Note: Heehee, things begin to get a little weird, man. This chapter features Death, the witches, Susan, Teatime, and a number of other oddities, all of whom are realizing that something has gone subtly awry.

Quite far away, in the vast, fetid city of Ankh-Morpork, Imander Scrubb was about to die.

He was a thief, or rather, would be a thief, once he had completed his apprenticeship with the Thieves' Guild. Currently he was trying to pick the pocket of one of Chrysoprase the troll's hired goons, which proved that stupidity really can be terminal.

Trolls are not by nature overly observant creatures, but even then can recognize the feeling of a wallet the size of a paving slab being hefted out of their back pocket. Imander was foolish to think he could even _lift_ a troll's wallet, let alone carry it anywhere, but, as has been mentioned, he wasn't too bright.

The troll turned, eyed him dully, and delivered a skull-cracking blow to his head without a blink. Imander dropped like a stone, and the wallet, which really _was_ a stone, shattered into a thousand pieces on the sidewalk.

The troll grunted, scooped up the fallen coins, and wandered off, leaving the still-cooling body to be idly stepped over by passers-by. In this part of Ankh-Morpork, a corpse on the sidewalk was as commonplace as chewing gum.

Imander stared in bewilderment at his body, until a hand tapped him on the shoulder.

THAT REALLY WASN'T A VERY GOOD IDEA, BOY.

He turned, and found himself confronted with a robed, scythe-bearing figure that even he couldn't fail to recognized. "I'm dead, aren't I?" he asked intelligently.

YOU'RE QUICK.

Imander beamed. "That's what my teacher said, sir, and he said it in just that tone of voice."

I'LL BET HE DID,Death muttered, as Imander's soul slowly faded. People like that kept him in business, but after all this time he still could not fail to marvel over the sheer stupidity of some people.

He turned, regarding the street around him. He'd had appointments here quite often—it wasn't the Shades, but it was close enough. This was the Street of Temples, on which were crammed shrines to just about every religion known on the Disc, and a few that weren't. The Temple of the Offler the Crocodile God was wedged in next to a garish, glittering building of a sect he didn't recognize, which was odd, as Death had personal acquaintance with most of the gods. It looked as though some maniac had managed to trap a rainbow within glass, and then, not satisfied, had sprinkled it with glitter and sequins and the odd fluffy pink cloud or two. Just looking at it made his head ache, which was another wonder, since he couldn't remember ever having had a headache before.

He took out his next lifetimer, and stared at it. _Joie DeVive_ it said, in curling letters, but that was not the odd thing. The odd thing was that the timer, which by all rights ought to have been filled with sand, held instead light, a brilliant blue light that swirled and eddied but did not pass down to the lower bulb. He knew where Joie DeVive was—he always knew where _everybody_ was—and he eyed the horrendous building speculatively.

_WELL_, he thought, _THAT'S_...INTERESTING.

He stepped out and crossed the street.

In the kingdom of Lancre, Granny Weatherwax was in a foul humor.

This was nothing new. If Granny _wasn't _in a foul humor, it was best to run, because it meant she'd either gone mad or been replaced by a Pod Person. However, she was in a particularly bad mood today, owing largely to the nightmares she'd had the night before.

She stalked up the pathway to Nanny Ogg's cottage, which at first glance was a cheerful place such as might house any elderly lady, though if one got a look at the lawn decorations one might wonder just what said lady had done for a living in her younger years. Granny didn't bother to knock, but barged right in, ignoring the flurry of daughters-in-law that hurried to get out of her way.

"Gytha!" she bellowed, loud enough to rattle the glass ornaments on the mantle. "Gytha, I believe we may have a problem."

Nanny Ogg's round, cheerful face stuck itself around the kitchen doorframe. "You mean a new one?" she said, adjusting her hat and ambling out into the parlor. "I've got company, girls. Scram."

The daughters-in-law accordingly scrammed, fleeing like a herd of terrified chickens.

"Sit down, Esme. Don't tell me someone stole young Verence's book again."

"No—"

"Goodie Hennedy sneezed herself into Yesterday?"

"No—"

"Don't tell me Agnes is on another diet."

"_No. _Gytha Ogg, will you shut up for five seconds and let a woman speak?"

Nanny shut up. When Granny Weatherwax used that tone, it was wise to shut up, if you valued your tongue intact.

"I had a Dream," Granny said, leaning back on the sofa and glancing disdainfully at Greebo, who had leapt onto the arm and was now cheerfully leering at her.

Nanny groaned. "As in, with a capital D?"

Granny nodded. "I did. You know I don't normally hold with this dream-sight business—"

"—of course not," muttered Nanny, who knew Granny didn't hold with anything unless she was the one doing it.

"—but this was...diff'runt." She shifted uneasily, and Nanny felt a pang of fear—for Esme to be uneasy was tantamount to a small Apocalypse.

"It wasn't very clear, but...there's somethin' abroad, somethin' worse'n we've ever faced, maybe. It's not far at all from here, an'...blast it, I couldn't _see!_ There's somethin' about a castle, an' a girl who ain't a girl, an' a man who ain't a man, who's crazier than a loon—"

She broke off, shaking her head. "I've never seen anythin' so muddled in my life. It's like the future was tryin' to show me something, but it didn't know what was to happen any more than I did. Long and short of it is, Gytha, there's somethin' mortal dangerous around here, and I'd like to find it before it finds Lancre."

Nanny sat and digested this. She knew that Esme's heart was in the right place, but she did tend to get a bit...well, _dramatic_ when she was bored. It was like she needed to exist in a constant state of upheaval, for without any upheaval to correct, what use was a witch? Things had been quiet in Lancre ever since the mess after the birth of Verence and Magrat's daughter had cleared up, and Granny hadn't had much to do. It was no wonder she was getting a bit...funny.

But still...Nanny put much more faith in dream-sight than Granny did, and if Granny was willing to believe it, it must have been convincing indeed. She didn't understand just what Granny meant by castles and people who weren't people, but she'd gotten through most of her life in a state of cheerful incomprehension of many things, so this didn't overly faze her.

"Where?" she asked.

"North of here. High in the mountains. I think we'd better take a look at it."

Nanny sighed—she had known that was coming. For a woman who didn't hold with messing about in 'forn' parts, Granny had become quite willing to travel. "Fine. Shall I summon Agnes, then?"

Granny nodded. "And Magrat, too, if Verence can spare her."

Nanny blinked. Granny hadn't had much use for Magrat even when she'd been a full-time witch, and now that she was into the queening business Granny hardly said a word about her. If she wanted Magrat along as well...good grief, what had she _seen?_

"If you say so," Nanny said at last, rising to her feet. Granny caught her hand.

"We may need her, Gytha," she said, in a tone of unaccustomed earnestness. "I don't know just what's waitin' for us, out there, but...I'll tell you plain truth, Gytha Ogg: is scares the daylights out of me."

Teatime surveyed his new castle with a happy, slightly manic gleam in his one good eye. The Auditors, bless them, had given him everything he would need to set up his own kingdom—castle, armies, herds of terrified peasants hunkering in badly-thatched huts—and he hoppity-skipped through the flagged corridors of his new abode, cackling with glee.

Teatime, like Verence, had absolutely no idea what one was supposed to do as king, and, like Verence, he had decided to order some books on the subject. Like everything provided by the Auditors, they arrived with alacrity, and he now bounded into the library and picked one up.

"_The Prince_," he mused, his eye taking in the title. It had been written by someone named Mockinnajelly. He flipped it open and thumbed through the table of contents, smiling slightly to himself. This was definitely not the sort of book Verence would have ordered—it said nothing about improving the lot of the common man, or of justly and fairly ruling all subjects. Instead it said a lot of things about torture and blood and ruling through fear, which were all subjects Teatime was quite interested in.

He settled into a fat armchair and began to read. Teatime might have been mad as a hatter, but he was quite intelligent, and it didn't take him long to plough through the first half of the massive tome. He learned he would need a Chief Torturer, an Inquisitor (several, to be on the safe side), a Privy Council (why anyone would want a council in a privy, he didn't know, but he'd make the arrangements), and other assorted people mostly designed to backstab one another for his own amusement.

It wasn't till he'd got halfway through the book that he struck a snag, and when he did he laid it on his lap and gazed thoughtfully at the opened pages. He'd reached chapter eighteen, which was entitled: "Thee Importanse of Choosing a Qeuen".

Hmm. _That_ one might pose a problem. Teatime had never given much thought to women before, having devoted most of his demented brainpower to plotting murder, performing murder, and gloating over murder, but if a king must have a queen then he supposed he must find one. The problem was, he wasn't acquainted with many women—oh, he'd met quite a few, very briefly, but none of them would be in any shape for queenship, even if he did want a zombie bride.

He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, thinking. Having memorized _Twerps' Peerage_ was an advantage—he could go over the lists of eligible females at will, dismissing this and that one. She had freckles, that one was fat, this one...oh, yes, he'd killed this one, hadn't he? Oops. He shut his eyes, humming tunelessly to himself, and then all at once they popped open again, alight with demented glee.

"_Perfect_," he said, clapping his hands like a delighted child. "Oh, this is going to be such _fun._"

It was currently recess time at the Learning Through Fun school, and Susan Sto-Helit was seated at her desk, enjoying a rare moment of silence. She was, as usual, dressed in black, and would have seemed perfectly at ease were it not for her hair. The wild white mass, with its one streak of black, was coiling and uncoiling itself restlessly—one minute it was in a bun, the next in a long braid down her back, and then a nest of ringlets. The children were used to this phenomenon by now, though they rarely saw it—it took quite a lot to fluster Susan, but she was flustered now, and the most irritating part was that she had absolutely no idea why.

She'd felt very odd all morning, as though something had gone vaguely wrong with the grand scheme of the universe. Against her established custom, she had sat and deliberately tried to remember the future, and for the first time in all her memory, she couldn't do it. It was as though the future itself didn't know what the hell was going on, and that only increased her agitation. If the future didn't know what was up, well, then, the gods only knew what had buggered up now.

She wondered vaguely if something had gone wrong with Lobsang—he was, after all, part human, and being Time couldn't be easy for someone who had grown up being (more or less) mortal. Susan would have died the death before she'd admit it, but she'd been thinking about Lobsang quite a lot, more even than she realized. He'd pop into her head at almost every idle moment, despite all her furious attempts to drive him out, until she was driven nearly to distraction.

_It's not like I care_, she told herself firmly. _If something's wrong with him, it affects all of us, that's all. Of course there's nothing personal in it._

Of course not.

She was just about to stand and tidy up when something came tumbling in through the open window, landing with a muffled curse atop a heap of broken crayons. Ordinarily Susan's heart would have sunk at the sight of it, but anything that broke her preoccupied worrying was welcome at this point. Besides, given who it was, they could probably give her some idea of what was going on.

"'s not _my_ fault," Quoth said irritably, sitting up and ruffling his feathers. "It's the downdrafts, I tell you. Murder on a poor bird."

The Death of Rats straightened his robes and shook his tiny scythe. SQUEAK, he said, and Susan didn't need to be able to understand him to know he was swearing. It was all in the tone.

"Oh, bugger off," Quoth said, glancing around the room. "There I was, just ready to settle down to a nice mess of eyeballs, and in you pop saying the Master has a message for his granddaughter, we've just _got_ to leave now, never mind my lunch..."

SQUEAKsaid the Death of the Rats, firmly, and Quoth dried up.

Susan sighed. "Dare I ask?" she said, crossing her arms. "No offense, but you two showing up usually means something's gone to hell again."

The Death of Rats leaped up onto her desk and waved his scythe excitedly.

SQUEAK, he said. SQUEAK EEK EEK EEEEEK.

Susan turned to Quoth for translation, her eyebrows raised. The little rat was more agitated than she'd ever seen it.

"He says your grandfather's found something...interesting, and wants you to drop in when you've got a moment," Quoth said, pecking at a marble. "Well, actually he said to drop everything and get over there, but frankly _I _can't see what's so urgent. He wasn't even home when we left."

Susan frowned. Death didn't usually contact her unless something had royally buggered up, but from the sounds of it that wasn't the case this time. The Death of Rats seemed more excited than upset, which was a rarity. Perhaps this wouldn't mean some odious chore for her, after all.

"All right," she said, stopping Time with a blink. "Let me get my coat."

Death stepped up to the wide stairs leading up to the garish building, and was about to pass through the front door when it abruptly opened. Someone started to heave out a bucket of wash-water, only to stop on sight of him and nearly trip, dropping the bucket and splashing everything within ten feet.

"_Bugger!_" she—it _was_ a she, more or less—swore, wiping fruitlessly at the soapsuds that had splattered her clothes. Death looked at her, and at the lifetimer, and if a skull could have raised its eyebrows he would have done so.

The woman left off her wiping and giggled, the slightly off-key giggle of someone who's either had too much to drink, or who's been into the magic mushrooms again. Given the woman's appearance, Death rather suspected the latter, and he watched impassively as she sat down in the soapy mess and laughed.

"Wow," she said at last, when her giggles dried up. "It was like..._splash, _man."

She blinked a pair of bloodshot, peculiarly golden eyes up at him, squinting as she tried vainly to focus on him. "Sorry 'bout that, man. You just...were like, _there_, and so was the water, and..._splash!_" She giggled again, almost falling over.

Death continued to stare. _WELL_, he thought, _SHE'S NOT QUITE WHAT I EXPECTED._ He knew damn well what he had found, but he still couldn't quite believe it. I mean..._honestly_.

The woman on the floor was quite small, and so pitifully scrawny she was almost as gaunt as himself. She wore a dress of swirling bright colors, that had clearly been made for a woman a good deal heavier than she, and was loaded down with so many strings of glass beads it was difficult to see where they left off and she began. Her brilliant yellow eyes were round, saucer-like, and slightly protuberant, and her skin and (exceptionally frizzy) hair were both as white as a sheet. Death had seen albinos before, but they never failed to give him the willies—they were too much like the walking dead for his own comfort.

JOIE DEVIVE? he said, stepping forward, and her laughter abruptly ceased.

"Tha's me," she said, struggling to her feet and offering a hand that bore the filthiest fingernails he had ever seen. "No need t' ask who _you_ are, 'm afraid. My time really up already?"

Death blinked. Ordinarily adults could not see him until they were already dead, unless they were magical, and this woman was no witch. NOT...PRECISELY, he said. TELL ME, JOIE DEVIVE, HOW OLD ARE YOU?

She stared at him, a shred of logic piercing even her cheerful stupor. "Shouldn't you know that?" she asked.

I SHOULD, BUT...I DO NOT. YOU ARE...DIFFERENT.

Joie shrugged. "Dunno," she said. "Never can r'member. You wanna sandwich?"

NO THANK YOU. He paused, looked at the lifetimer, and at Joie, and compared the two with what all his instincts were telling him had to be true, however much he didn't want to believe it. I THINK YOU HAD BETTER COME WITH ME.

Joie quirked an eyebrow. "What, you mean, alive? Wha' for?"

Death crossed his arms. EVER HEARD OF LIFE?

"You mean, the wossname, state of being?"

NO. THE PERSON. ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION, TO BE PRECISE.

She shook her head. "Nuh-uh."

WELL, YOU SHOULD HAVE. YOU'RE IT. NOW FOLLOW ME.

Joie blinked owlishly at him, started to nod, and then fell flat on her face, stone-cold unconscious.

Death sighed. THIS IS GOING TO BE A LONG DAY.

Perpetrator's Note #2:cackle: I realize that's not the best place to leave off, but I wanted to hack it before the chapter got too bloated. Next chapter features the wizards of UU, some very confused Watchmen, the witches' visit to Teatime's kingdom, and what Teatime does about finding a queen. Mayhem, drunkenness, and magic mushrooms abound.


	3. Oh, Bugger

A/N: Here be chapter three...I wrote this after four shots of Jagermeister, and though I've cleaned up the spelling I fear it may show.

—

Susan stepped out onto the street, and was unsurprised to find Binky waiting for her. She patted him affectionately on the nose, and was about to climb aboard when a hand tapped her shoulder. A very cold, clammy hand.

She turned, startled that anyone should see her, and found herself faced with what was unmistakably a zombie. She blinked.

"Susan Sto-Helit?" it said, its voice the grate of gravel.

She blinked again. "Er, yes," she said. "Who—"

She got no further. Without a change of expressionlessness it raised an arm and hit her over the head, knocking her consciousness into next Wednesday. It caught her as she dropped, sidestepped a furious kick from Binky, and shuffled off down the street.

The Death of Rats, who had popped his head out the window just in time to see all this, gave a SQUEAK of distress and tugged at Quoth, who was currently trying to wrestle a marble down his throat.

"What?" he said irritably, spitting out the marble in disgust. "Pah! That's no eyeball. It's all a dirty trick."

The Death of Rats hopped from foot to foot, pointing and squeaking. Quoth looked out just in time to see the Susan-bearing zombie round a corner.

"Hey!" he croaked. "What the—"

SQUEAK, affirmed the Death of Rats. SQUEAK EEK.

"Right. Follow that zombie."

A moment later raven and rat were soaring above the city, hot on the heels of Susan's (surprisingly quick) abductor. They nearly collided with a gnome riding an obese pigeon, who shook his fist furiously and demanded they pull over.

SQUEAK, the Death of Rats spat, urging Quoth on.

"He said, 'Bugger off'," Quoth said helpfully to the gnome, and zoomed past, flapping for dear life.

"Hey, wait a minute!" the gnome cried indignantly, and sped off in hot pursuit, calling for backup as he went.

"Nosy blighter," Quoth muttered. "Where'd they go?"

SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats, pointing.

"Right." Quoth zoomed into a dive, plowing right through a flock of gnome-bearing herons that seemed to appear out of thin air.

"Move it or lose it!" the raven screeched, banking left as the zombie turned.

"You! Pull over, in the name of the Watch!" cried a gnome, who, being too busy shrieking at them, did not notice the side of a building until he'd smashed into it.

Quoth ignored him, and another gnome took over the cry. "He's headin' for the city gates! Get 'im, before he leaves airspace!"

SQUEAK, the Death of Rats said irritably. He leapt to his feet and started fending off his would-be attackers with his tiny scythe. An errant swing caught a seagull in the chest and dropped it like a stone, leaving its rider to scream, "Bugger—I mean, mayday!" until another of his fellows rescued him.

"That's it, Ratty!" Quoth said, swooping beneath the boughs of a massive oak. His eyes were trained on the zombie, now almost at the city gates—

SQUEAK, the Death of Rats cried again, tugging frantically at his feathers. SQUEAK SQUEAK.

"Not now, Ratty—almost got 'em—"

_SQUEAK!_

"What _is_ it?" Quoth looked up, just in time to see the very solid blackness of a gate-post swoop toward his head.

"Oh, b—"

SPLAT. CRUNCH.

The Death of Rats picked himself up off the cobblestones, shaking his head as he dusted off his robes.

SQUEAK, he said morosely, as the herd of gnomes descended on them.

—

It was nearly lunchtime at Unseen University, but unlike most of the other wizards, Ponder Stibbons was still hard at work and, frankly, confused as hell.

He'd come in early enough, and had found Hex in the middle of the most massive meltdown he had ever seen. Ream upon ream of paper had been ejected from the thinking machine, all bearing scrawls like ERROR BISCUIT TWIGTWIG CHEESE and BOOGER HAMSTER &?#ÕÍ€¥. Apparently Hex had been at it all night, judging by the pile of paper beneath it, and it took Ponder a good half-hour just to calm the machine down.

He dug through the papers, hoping to make some sense of Hex's gibberish, but he could make heads nor tails of it. Finally, once the machine had gotten ahold of itself, he tapped in several questions, his face growing graver with each answer he received. Finally, having found more than he wanted to know, he picked up the sheaf of papers and hurried to the great hall and thrust them under the Archchancellor's nose, where they barely missed being skewered by a forkful of partridge.

Ridcully blinked, more than a little irritated at having his lunch thus interrupted. "Yes, Ponder?" he said, stifling an inward sigh—it wasn't _natural _for a wizard to place work before food.

"Archchancellor, I think we may have a problem," Ponder said nervously. "Hex has discovered something...rather disturbing."

Ridcully took the papers from him and looked at them, but could make nothing of the thinking machine's scribbles. "And it would be...?" he asked, snatching another bite when Ponder wasn't looking.

"Er, well, it seems to have found an emanation of pure evil somewhere in the Ramtops," Ponder said, taking back the papers.

The Dean snorted. "And that's anything unusual?"

"Well, yes, actually...this...according to Hex's calculations, there was a massive thaumaturgical flux in an area near the kingdom of Lancre, at about eleven o'clock local time. That would be around one in the morning here, which is when Hex...crashed, for lack of a better word. It seems as though an immense amount of magic was expended in one concentrated area, and now...well, it's a bit of a black hole, I think."

"And this has what to do with us?" asked the Chair of Indefinite Studies, around a mouthful of treacle.

Ponder glared at him. "With all due respect, sir, it's an _emanation of pure evil._ And we're _wizards_. It's our bloody job to deal with things like that. Suppose it's a break-in from the Dungeon Dimensions?"

That shut everybody up. Few there had ever actually _dealt _with anything from the Dungeon Dimensions, but they'd all heard stories, and the stories were more than enough.

"You...have a point, Ponder," Ridcully said slowly. "It's near...Lancre, you say? How close?"

"About twenty miles away, sir. Next valley over, really."

Ridcully swallowed. "Really? Well...suppose we could send out a delegation to investigate...will probably turn out to be nothing, but better safe than sorry, I always say..." If anybody knew just what he was thinking, they didn't let on, though his swiftly reddening face caused more than a few raised eyebrows. He couldn't help but wonder...of course it was probably nothing, but, well, Lancre was Esme's country, and Esme's family did have something of a reputation for black magic...if she'd gone and done something foolish, he felt it his duty to save her from herself. And everybody else, for that matter. "Ponder, I want you to go and talk to that thinking-machine of yours, and see if it can't guess what in hell's happening out there. I'll pick a committee, and we'll head out on the first coach out of the city. Any volunteers?"

As a man, the wizards all sunk lower in their chairs, until in more than one case only a pointy hat stuck above the edge of the table.

"Right," Ridcully said. "It'll be mandatory volunteering, then."

which for a wizard, meant about ten-thirty that morning

Wizards are good with gibberish. They should be, considering they invented it.

—

Getting Joie out of the land of the living was not as easy as it sounded. Sure, she might be unconscious (and snoring gently), but she was surprisingly heavy for such an emaciated specimen, and she had an unfortunate tendency of flailing in her stupor and smacking innocent passers-by. It took Death a full quarter of an hour just to get her properly loaded onto Binky (who had, had he only noticed, appeared incredibly agitated), narrowly escaping a cracked jaw in the process, and no sooner had they got going than she half-woke, muttered, "Pass the mustard", and keeled right off the back of the horse.

Death sighed, picked her up by the armpits, and settled her in front of him instead, grimacing as she raised her head long enough to let out a belch almost loud enough to qualify as a sonic boom. She reeked of absinthe and a few other chemicals he didn't even want to try to identify, and if she'd had a bath at any point in the last century he'd eat his scythe.

_WHERE HAS SHE BEEN?_ he wondered, as Binky struggled to get up speed. It was common knowledge among the various anthropomorphic personifications that Life had been missing for the last several hundred years, though if she'd spent all that time as _non compos mentis _as she was now, that was hardly any surprise. Nobody knew why she'd gone missing, any more than they knew where she'd been, but given that it seemed to be the job of every other personification to bugger up her work, he supposed he couldn't blame her for bowing out of the social scene. But still...if this was an indication of her normal state, it was no wonder that life in general made no sense.

_FURTHER MYSTERIES AWAIT, _he thought, as they passed through the barrier between reality and Death's own world. He only hoped that Susan would be able to deal with this—she, being alive, must surely be better equipped to deal with Life than he was.

They sped along through the heavens, Joie still snoring and occasionally muttering things like, "No thanksh, givesh me gas." She certainly did move quite a lot, for an unconscious person, and all in all Death was most relieved when they alighted on the black lawn. He turned Binky loose to graze and hauled the cataleptic Joie into the front hall.

ALBERT, he called, his voice echoing through the cavernous space, ALBERT, I HAVE A PROJECT FOR YOU.

Albert dutifully appeared, muttering resentfully at being so peremptorily summoned from his domain in the kitchen. He blinked when he caught sight of his master.

"What is _that, _master?" he asked, eying Joie as though she were a particularly nasty specimen the cat had dragged in.

Death had to admit, the man had a point. He sighed. MY COUNTERPART, I FEAR. DO SOMETHING WITH HER, WILL YOU? SHE...SMELLS. Death, strictly speaking, did not possess olfactory senses, but a stench such as this would have curled the proverbial nose-hairs of a rock. It was the sort of stink that made Foul Ole Ron's Smell seem like a bouquet of roses.

Albert blinked. And blinked again. "Your...counterpart?" he said blankly.

YES. THE ANTHROPOMORPHIC PERSONIFICATION OF LIFE. WHO IS CURRENTLY COMATOSE, I MIGHT POINT OUT. PLEASE INSTALL HER SOMEWHERE, UNTIL SHE REGAINS HER SENSES. SUSAN SHOULD BE HERE SHORTLY, AND CAN TAKE OVER FROM THERE.

"I...see," said Albert, who didn't. "I'll just...put her in the spare room, shall I?"

AS YOU WISH. Death unloaded the scrawny figure onto Albert, who promptly dropped her and cursed. Joie didn't wake, though she did mutter something vaguely obscene.

"You didn't tell me she weighed as much as a bloody elephant!" Albert said, when Death gave him a pained glance. "How can somethin' that scrawny be as heavy as granite?"

Death considered a moment. PHYSICS, I THINK, he said, picking Joie up again. Strictly speaking, he didn't have a spare room, but Ysabell's old one would do for now, provided the woman didn't wake up and vomit all over it. HAVE YOU SEEN SUSAN? I SENT THE RAT TO SUMMON HER.

Albert shook his head. "'fraid not, master. Nobody's been in since you left."  
Death's eyelights blinked. Of course it would naturally take some time for the rat to fetch Susan, but there was something vaguely...wrong. I SEE, he said. WELL, WHEN THEY ARRIVE, SEND THEM TO ME.

"Will do, Master. Er...about the smell?"

—

Sam Vimes had been having quite a fine day, until they'd brought the rat in. As Commander of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, he liked to think he'd seen just about everything there was to see, but the rat...well, let's just say he could have done without the rat. Several of his gnomes had arrested it for reckless driving of a raven, which was technically all well and good, but now that he had it in custody he'd be damned if he knew what to do with it.

Most people couldn't see the Death of Rats, because the human mind rebels against the sight of the apparently impossible, but being commander of the Ankh-Morpork Watch meant that the apparently impossible was all in a day's work. Consequently Vimes saw it exactly as it was—a tiny rat skeleton, in a black robe, with a miniscule scythe.

SQUEAK, it said, and if ever a rat could be said to have an eldritch voice of command, this one did.

"He says this is all a mistake," Quoth translated. "You see, Death sent us to find his granddaughter, but she got waylaid by a zombie, and we were just chasing it down. Nothin' illegal about that, now is there?"

Vimes stared blankly at the raven. It wasn't that he hadn't heard it, it was just that his brain still hadn't quite managed to wrap itself around the fact of the bird's existence. So far as he knew talking birds only lived in stories, and they certainly didn't pal around with the Grim Reaper of Rats.

"You honestly expect me to believe that?" he asked, quirking an eyebrow.

Quoth cocked his head to one side. "Have you _looked_ at the rat, mister? See the scythe? Who do you think he's connected with, the Hogfather?

Vimes opened his mouth to respond, realized there really was no good retort to that, and shut it again. He was saved from having to think of something by Nobby, who stuck his head through the door, hat held nervously in his hands. He blinked at rat and raven, shook his head, and addressed Vimes in a surprisingly deferential tone.

"Er, sir, sorry to interrupt, but I fear we may have a bit of a problem," he said. "It's only...well, nobody can find the Patrician, sir."

Vimes blinked. "What?"

"The Patrician's...missing, sir. And there's this." He placed a note on Vimes' desk, snatching his hand back as the raven took a peck at his finger.

Vimes picked it up. It read, quite simply:

_Have borrowed your Patrician. Would say we'd return him, but by the time we're done, there will be nothing to return, nor, indeed, anywhere to return it to. Whatever you do, don't go looking for him in the Ramtops. _

Yours sincerely,

the Auditors.

He stared. "When did you find this, Nobby?" he asked, setting it down and eying the corporal.

Nobby twisted his had nervously in his hands. "About eight this morning," he said.

Vimes rubbed his temples. "And it didn't occur to you that I might have needed to know about it _then?"_ he asked incredulously.

"Well, er, we thought it might be some kind of a joke, sir. You know, on account of Saint Wossname's day bein' so close and all."

Vimes groaned. "That's Fool's Day, Nobby. Saint Wossname's is the one with all the pink hearts and nauseating candy."

Nobby blinked. "Oh. Right. Er, anyway, we're fairly sure it's not a joke, sir."

"And how'd you come by that amazing deduction?" Vimes muttered under his breath, rising and pacing across his office. "What have you done about it?" he asked aloud, ignoring the raven, which was trying to eat the grapes in the wax fruit bowl on his desk.

"Um, well, I gave you the note, sir."

"That's it?"

"That's it. I reckon we should try the Ramtops, sir. There's a group of wizards headin' up there soon, you know."

No, Vimes didn't know it. "How'd you find that out?" he asked.

"One've came askin' for police escort. Said there was a bit of nasty business up there, and they'd prefer some military types about." He puffed up his pigeon-chest proudly. "Us. Military types. Now _there's_ an honor, sir. 'Course, I had to say no, it bein' so far out of our jurisdiction, but it's the thought that counts. Shall I tell them we've changed our minds, then?"

Vimes nodded slowly. "I think so," he said. Strictly speaking, the Watch had no authority (or interest) in things that went on outside the city, except in very special circumstances, but certainly the kidnapping of the Patrician fell under such definition. He waved Nobby a dismissal. "See to it, Corporal, and report back to me when you've got something to report."

Nobby saluted and departed, and Vimes turned back to the pair on his desk, both of whom were looking on politely. He sat down, folded his hands, and fixed them with his best Penetrating Stare.

"So," he said, "I don't suppose you two would know anything about all this, being creatures of the Occult and all? Give me something useful, and I may just let you off with a warning." He doubted they knew anything, but it would be a good excuse to get them off his hands and let him get down to the real business at hand.

Rat and raven looked at one another. "Are you sure you want to ask that?" the raven asked. "Because, you know, we _will_ tell you."

—

Lord Havelock Vetinari was _not_ having a good day. He had gone to bed, as usual, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, but he had woken up...well, he still wasn't rightly sure what he'd woken up as. Doomed, most likely. He definitely wasn't in Ankh-Morpork, that was for certain—even without the mountain view outside his window, the lack of the city's stench would have been telltale enough.

He was shut up in a rough stone tower, of the sort usually reserved for captive princesses rather than old politicians, and though he'd found breakfast waiting on a small table he'd yet seen no one. The room looked like it had been decorated by a mentally deficient vampire—everything was either black or red, including the fluffy slippers that had been placed by his bedside, but the gothic look had a slightly artificial feel, as though it had been slapped together on the spur of the moment. Try as he might, he couldn't pin the decorative atrocity of such a room on any of his known enemies, and was consequently left to wonder just who he'd pissed off now.

He was still wondering this when the door to his prison opened, and something with all the energy of a rabid puppy bounded in. It took Vetinari a moment to focus on it, and when he did he blinked—whatever he'd expected in a captor, this wasn't it.

It was a boy, or something vaguely resembling one. The lad had a cheerful, friendly face, that would have been much more convincing if his eyes hadn't looked like something plucked from the bottom of a nightmare.

"Hi!" the boy said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Welcome. You're my new Privy Councilor. I hope you don't mind."

Now, Lord Vetinari was no fool—he wouldn't have remained Patrician of a city like Ankh-Morpork for more than five minutes if he had been. Had anyone else said something like that to him, they would have quite swiftly repented of it, but Vetinari, being rather a decent judge of human character, quickly surmised that it wouldn't be wise to correct the boy. He had a distinct feeling that arguing with someone like this would be very prejudicial to his health, mainly because one would have to be a blind fruitbat not to notice that the lad was completely and utterly insane.

And so, rather than reacting in his customary manner (which would have been to melt his opponent with sarcasm), he straightened and said, quite civilly, for him, "Not at all. Might I inquire as to who you are?"

"Oh! Sorry. The name is Teatime, Jonathan Teatime—_do_ take care to pronounce it correctly, will you? Nothing irritates me more than having my name said incorrectly, and when I get irritated I tend to do things I might later regret." He swept his arms expansively, indicating the room and what was visible of the castle through the windows beyond. "This is my castle, and this is my kingdom, and you and everybody else here have been called to help me in my mission."

Vetinari sat back, watching Teatime's every move with the trained eye of a psychologist. The power-hungry always tended to be a bit cracked, but Teatime was as fractured as a troll with arthritis. "And what would that be?" he asked neutrally, folding his blue-veined hands before him.

Teatime beamed, clasping his hands behind him. "It's all part of a commission, really. I was an Assassin, you see, before...well, before, and I've been granted the commission that could make me the most famous Assassin in the history of the world."

Vetinari looked at him questioningly. "Yes?" he said.

"I'm going to kill Life."

Vetinari blinked. "...I thought that was what an Assassin did anyway?" he ventured, mentally revising his judgment of Teatime from Insane to Barking, Howling Mad.

"Oh, well, yes, but I don't mean life in general. I mean _Life_, the person. There is one, you know." Teatime rocked back and forth, his controlled, unhurried movements reminding Vetinari more of a dancer or acrobat than an Assassin.

"I...see," he said slowly, having not the slightest idea how to respond to such an extraordinary pronouncement. "And I'm to help you, am I?"

"Oh, yes. The book says so, you know. Kings have to have a Privy Councilor, so you're it. You're meant to...advise me, I suppose."

Vetinari arched an eyebrow. "If you want advice as to how to go about killing Life, I'm afraid I may not be of much assistance. I wasn't aware there was such a thing as Life incarnate."

Teatime waved a hand. "Of course there is," he said. "After all, there's a Death, isn't there?"

"Is there?"

"Yes. I met him once. Tall chap. No sense of humor. Had a very lovely granddaughter..." He cocked his head to one side, as though listening. "Who should be arriving just about now. I will bid you good-day, Mr. Vetinari." He hopped out and slammed the door behind him, leaving Vetinari reeling, both from the absurdity of his speech and the unaccustomed shock of being called 'Mister'.

"Well," he said aloud, to the room in general. "I believe we will have to do something about that one. Preferably something involving many sharp pointy things."

—

Susan's zombie abductor could not, naturally, have made it all the way from Ankh-Morpork to the Ramtops on his own. Teatime had instructed his new court magician to make certain the creature could just hoppity-skip over the ensuing distance, and the wizard, thanks mainly due to a positive ecstasy of terror, had actually managed to do it. Now he only hoped to the gods he could _keep _doing it long enough to not get killed.

Rincewind gulped when Teatime left the room, humming to himself and swinging a heavy set of keys. Rincewind, like Vetinari, had no idea how he'd gotten here, nor what in hell that madman wanted with him. All he knew was that the madman was of the sort who liked to pop people's heads off just to see what would happen, and Rincewind, who was very attached to his life(and his head), wondered desperately what he had done to deserve all this. He'd had innumerable miraculous escapes thus far, but he knew well that his luck would only last him so long, and he really, _really _didn't want it to run out here.

He fiddled nervously with his hat, dropping it several times, and gulped down a tall glass of water. He wasn't sure what the zombie had been sent to fetch, but if it was another person to join this unwilling circus, then he felt very sorry for them indeed. However, had he known just who and what that person was, he would have felt much more sorry for Teatime.

—

Granny, Nanny, Agnes, and Magrat arrived at the edge of Teatime's valley just as the zombie ambled down into it. They huddled in the bushes as it drew near, watching with frank curiosity as it shuffled on, its eyes filled with dumb purpose. It was carrying what looked like a bundle of black cloth, though as it came nearer Agnes, who had by far the best eyesight, realized that it was in fact a person.

"What d'you think it's doin'?" Granny asked. She didn't hold truck with zombies, mostly because she felt that anything that had died ought to have the decency to remain dead. "It's got somebody with it."

Nanny squinted, and then paled—it wasn't just anybody the zombie had hold of; she'd recognize that white hair anywhere. "Oh, _bugger_," she said, staring as the zombie passed their hiding-spot without so much as a glance. "_That's _not goin' to end well, I'm thinkin'."

"What's not?" Magrat asked, picking several twigs and an errant sparrow from her hair.

"That's Death's granddaughter it's got," Nanny said. "Met her once—strange woman. I tell you, if whatever's up here thinks he can get away with somethin' like that, it's not long for this world."

The other three stared at her. "Death's...granddaughter?" Agnes asked. Inside her head Perdita was trying to work that one out, and both of them decided it was probably better not to wonder.

Nanny nodded. "Aye...I'm not about to ask, either. Point is, you go messin' about with the offspring of the likes of him, and you're bound to find your head shoved up—"

"I think we understand, Gytha," Granny said, cutting her off. "Well, there's nothing for it—we'll just have to rescue her."

Nanny looked dubiously at the other two. Granted, there were four of them and only one zombie, but Magrat was and always would be a wet hen, and Nanny wasn't half sure that Agnes wasn't more than a bit mental. As for Granny...well, ordinarily she'd put all her money on Granny against even a horde of zombies, but something here just didn't sit right.

"I'm not so sure that's such a good idea," Nanny said slowly. "After all, we don't even know what we're up against, here. Anyway, she's a smart girl—a sight too smart for her own good, if you ask me—and if I'm any judge o' character, I'm bettin' there'll be a right explosion when she wakes up."

Granny stared at her. "Are you sayin' we should let it take her up _there?"_ she asked, jerking a thumb at the castle.

Nanny nodded. "Think about it," she said. "The lass is Death's granddaughter—get her angry enough, she might just take care of this problem for us."

Granny hadn't thought of that. She considered a moment. "All right," she said. "But if she blows up half the Ramtops, don't say I didn't warn you."

"Oh, I don't think she could do _that_," Nanny said, with all the confidence of an expert on the descendants of anthropomorphic personifications. "She'd have to be a witch, for that. But I'm bettin' she could make short work of whatever's up there."

"Well, we'll let things be, then," Granny said. "For now—I must admit, I don't fancy the idea of stormin' that place without help, though sure gods I couldn't tell you why."

Granny frowned. So far as she could remember she'd never hesitated to do anything in her life—she was a witch, by gum, and anything foolish enough to get in her way had better be prepared to spend some time looking for all its appendages. Uncertainty was a wholly new emotion to her, and she didn't like it in the slightest.

The zombie ambled onward, disappearing into the castle gates, which shut behind it with a boom that sounded uncomfortably final.

—

Heehee...thus it continues. Next chapter sees everyone slowly gathering together in the Ramtops, Susan wakes up, and a fat, drunken cherub starts making trouble for all.


	4. Cupids and Other Catastrophes

Albert turned off the taps and surveyed his work with satisfaction. This was a bath to delight the fussiest connoisseur of baths, a concoction of delicately scented foam that steamed invitingly.

Joie, a.k.a. Life, was curled up on the bathroom floor, still snoring gently, and Albert smiled grimly as he hauled her up by the wrists and dumped her, clothes, beads, and all, into the massive tub.

She came up spluttering, grimy white hair plastered to her face, her golden eyes round as saucers.

"What'd ye have to go an' do that for?" she demanded, coughing.

Albert folded his arms. "Trust me, you needed it," he said. "There's towels and soap and a dressing gown—I strongly recommend you make use of all three." He turned and marched off, shutting the door and laughing quietly to himself.

He picked up his tea tray from the hall table and carried it into Death's study, still chuckling to himself. Death looked up from his massive book.

ALBERT, WAS THAT REALLY NECESSARY? he asked, sounding somewhat pained.

"'Course it was," Albert retorted, setting down the tray. "I'm not about to be killed by the Stench of Life."

Death considered this. POINT TAKEN, he said. HAS SUSAN ARRIVED YET?

Albert shook his head. "Not yet. You know those two—either distracted by eyeballs or cheese, you mark my words." He turned and hobbled off, muttering.

Death paused thoughtfully. It wasn't like either the raven or the rat to delay when he gave them a message, nor was it like Susan to refuse a summons. He stood, setting the book aside, and stalked over to his long mirror. He laid one bony hand on the frame and peered intently into it.

SHOW ME, he commanded.

———

The first thing Susan was aware of was a thumping pain in her head, and the second was that up to now she hadn't been aware of anything, which could hardly be right. She was lying on something soft, which did nothing to ease the fearful crick in her neck, and she brought a hand up to her head and groaned, wondering if it was about to split open.

Her eyes opened slowly, and immediately wished they hadn't—they were confronted by a mismatched pair that stared intently down into them, scant inches away.

She let out a very un-Susan-like shriek, and reacted the way anyone would have in a situation like that, which was to hit the owner of the eyes around the head and send him flying. She scrambled upright, cracking her head on a bedpost, and swore.

Teatime, apparently not at all put off by her greeting, bounced onto the foot of the bed and stood balancing like a dancer, beaming happily at her. Susan, through a haze of white agony, stared at him blankly—this _couldn't _be real; she of all people knew that the dead could not return, and last she had seen him Teatime had been very, very dead.

"I...er...you...you're _dead_," she said, the one and only thing she was sure of at the moment. "You can't be here, you're dead, I _killed_ you, for bugger's sake..."

Teatime simply continued beaming at her. "Oh, I have some new friends who decided to fix that for me," he said. "I'm so happy you're awake, Susan...we're going to have such _fun_ together." He hopped off the footboard and bounced into sitting position directly before her, his mismatched eyes wide in his boyish face.

Susan stared at him, her mind still temporarily unable to process any of this, and she did the one and only thing she was capable of doing—she slapped him again. Hard.

He blinked. "Was that really necessary?" he asked, one hand straying to his reddening cheek. "Come now, that's no way to treat your future husband."

Susan had already drawn her hand back for another blow, but it stopped mid-swing, her eyes widening to roughly the size of dinner plates. _WHAT?_ she demanded, the eldritch voice of Death coming out without her even trying.

Teatime's grin widened. "That's the thing, see," he said, his slightly manic good cheer seeming to surround him like an aura. "These new friends of mine, they've made me a king, and everyone knows a king needs a queen, which is where _you_ come in."

Susan, having absolutely no idea how to respond to such an extraordinary pronouncement, opted for letting her hand continue its swing and slapping him yet again.

"Why me?" she demanded. Some of her self-possession was returning, and with it came a healthy dose of good old Susan Sto-Helit temper.

Teatime waved a hand. "You're the only girl I know I haven't killed," he said, as if it should be obvious.

"How romantic," Susan muttered dryly, slapping him on sheer principal.

"Besides," he continued, ignoring both mutter and slap, "it's a perfect match, don't you think? King of the world and granddaughter of Death? Just think of the children."

Susan did. The thought made her slightly ill.

Teatime bounced to his feet before she could think up a suitably crushing response. "Of course you'll want to freshen up a bit, I suppose," he said. He'd read a great deal on the personal habits of queens, and it never would have occurred to him that just because he'd decided to make Susan one meant she possessed all the habitual attributes. "There's a lav and clothes and all that—I had my court advisor see to it. Till dinner, then." And with that he was gone, not bothering to lock the door behind him.

Susan stared for several moments, attempting to collect her scattered wits, before giving a grim shake of her head and rising. "Bugger this," she muttered, heading for the nearest wall—

—which she bounced right off of, just as if...well, just as if she were normal.

"Oh, you can't do that," Teatime called through the door, as she rubbed her forehead and cursed. "The last thing I needed was you out wandering around, so I had my friends make a few...modifications. I really suggest you don't try to escape, Susan—you're _supposed _to be here, you know."

Susan, a lump already forming on her forehead, did not answer, but scowled at the door so fiercely it was a wonder it didn't burst into flames from sheer embarrassment. She didn't know what in the name of all the gods was behind this, but she'd be damned if she was going to go along with it. After all, she thought, still muttering to herself, she'd killed him once—it couldn't be _that_ hard to do it again, could it?

———

Vimes, having chosen a small squad to accompany him on their rescue mission, was still left with the problem of the rat and the raven. He'd sent Nobby to inform the wizards that a few Watchmen would indeed be accompanying them on their trip to the Ramtops, and Nobby had quickly returned with not only the Archchancellor in tow, but what seemed like half his staff. Vimes, who had at the moment been trying to shake the rat out of his left boot, was distractedly introduced to the Dean, the Bursar, a young wizard named Stibbons (who apparently had no title) and his assistant, Big Mad Drongo, and an orangutan that was apparently the Librarian. Vimes, being a sensible human being, had up until now had as little to do with the wizards of Unseen University as possible, but even the most bizarre rumors he had heard didn't do this lot justice.

"When would you, er, like to leave?" he asked, swatting at the Death of Rats with an old feather duster.

"As soon as possible, my good man," Ridcully answered, eying the rat speculatively. "I say, where did you find that...thing?"

"Fourth Airborne arrested it this morning," Vimes said grimly, making a snatch for the little cowled figure and missing. "Damned if I know what to do with it—it doesn't seem to want to leave."

"That's because it knows it's for it, if the master finds out," the raven said, pecking hopefully at a bowl of chestnuts. "Not supposed to let ourselves get arrested, we aren't."

Vimes stopped in mid-grab, his brain digesting that one. He opened his mouth and then shut it again, deciding he really, _really _didn't want to ask.

"Well," he said at last, "I hardly need the two of you around here. Supposing I just let you off with a warning, eh?"

The raven shook his head. "No good—the master finds out about a warning, and we're both gated for goodness knows how long. Not a good thing for the rat population, if you take my meaning."

Vimes did. He didn't want to, but he did. "Well then...oh, bloody hell, just get out of here and don't do it again, all right?"

OH, I ASSURE YOU, THEY WON'T.

Big Mad Drongo dropped his staff. Ponder Stibbons choked. And Vimes, who suddenly felt as though his stomach had made an emergency exit via his feet, slowly turned.

It is true that most humans cannot see Death, as they cannot see the Death of Rats, because their minds simply will not allow them to see anything they do not believe should exist. However, as has been stated before, the men (and women, and dwarfs, and etc.) of the Watch came up against things that should not exist on an almost daily basis. So it was that Vimes saw Death exactly as he was, a black-clad, scythe-bearing, seven-foot skeleton, who was currently leaning against the wall with folded arms, regarding rat and raven with an expression that would have made an iceberg freeze to death.

SQUEAK, the Death of Rats uttered, and dove behind Ridcully.

"With you there, mate," said the raven, and dove behind the rat.

Silence fell, lasting for several excruciating minutes, until Vimes cleared his throat.

"Erm, hello, your lordship," he said, nodding his head. "I say, none of us has an appointment with you, do we? Only it's a bit of rotten timing—"

Death held up a hand. NO, I HAVE NO...APPOINTMENTS, AS SUCH. HOWEVER, IF I UNDERSTAND CORRECTLY, YOU ARE ALL BOUND FOR THE KINGDOM OF LANCRE, ARE YOU NOT?

"Uh, well, yes, actually. How did you—"

THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT. WHAT _IS_ IMPORTANT IS THAT YOU GET THERE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.

Death raised his other hand and at once Binky stood beside him, taking up most of the floorspace in the little office. He nibbled affectionately at Big Mad Drongo's hat, causing the young man to almost wet himself in absolutely exquisite terror. I BELIEVE I MAY BE OF SOME HELP.

Ridcully, who was after all the only one there who had much previous experience with Death, looked at him quizzically. "Why?" he asked. "Not that we're not appreciative, I'm sure, but what's in it for you?"

Death's eyelights flared brighter for a moment, causing all of them to take an unconscious step backwards.

IT IS...PERSONAL, he said. A FAMILY MATTER, YOU MIGHT SAY. I SHALL EXPECT YOUR HELP IN RETURN, MIND YOU.

"If you say so, your lordship," Vimes said, swallowing hard. He knew that logically he had nothing to fear from Death until his time was up, but logic doesn't hold much sway when one is confronted by the Grim Reaper in the, as it were, flesh. "I've chosen a few of the lads to go with me—"

I KNOW, Death said, waving a hand. THEY SHALL COME AS WELL.

Nobody, not even Ridcully, was rightly aware of what came next. Ridcully knew that Death traveled the world on Binky, but it would be madness to assume that nine people, an orangutan, a rat, a raven, and an anthropomorphic personification could all fit onto one horse, however magical it might be. All he knew was that the entire world seemed to dissolve into a brilliant confusion of blue sparks, and the next thing he knew he was standing in the middle of what looked like a small kitchen garden, the high slopes of the Ramtops marching off into the distance all around him. He absently reached out and righted the Bursar, who had somehow landed on his head, and looked around.

Several Watchmen had been transported, in addition to Commander Vimes and the other wizards. Ridcully knew none of them, but if they were any decent example it was no wonder newcomers to Ankh-Morpork seldom took the Watch seriously. Nor were they the only ones—something that might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, have passed for a woman stood not far off, clad in a woolly blue dressing gown that was acres too large with a towel on her head. She was staring vacantly at the cottage beyond the garden, a cottage Ridcully recognized all too well, and which he regarded with an emotion that might have been mild apprehension or stark, staring terror.

It was Esme Weatherwax's cottage, and somebody was home.

———

The Discworld is noted for its magical field. Most worlds have ozone and stratospheres and things of that nature, but the Discworld has magic, or, to be more precise and olde-worlde, Magick. Its inhabitants were so used to it that nine-tenths of them never noticed it was there, but the other tenth, the ones who were for whatever reason naturally attuned to the fluctuations of the magical field, could tell you exactly which butterfly's flapping had caused the typhoon that destroyed half of Fourecks.

Most of them were, as of now, both confused and very, very worried.

War, Famine, and Pestilence hadn't had much to do with one another for eons, up until the most recent mess with the Auditors, but they now sat gathered together around the great table in War's longhouse, sipping cups of tea and doing their best to eat all the concoctions Mrs. War set before them.

"I don't like it," Pestilence said. "There's wrong and there's..._wrong_, and this is the wrongest wrong I've ever felt. You mark my words, somebody's targeting one of us again."

"What, one of _us?_" Famine said, looking up from his plate. "You mean, the three of us?"

"No, not us exactly, but...a personification. It feels just like it did when that lunatic went after the Fate sisters."

Pestilence let that sink in. Ages ago there had been three Sisters of Fate, just as there were usually three witches—the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Thanks to a crazed Balancing Monk named Long Shoo, who became convinced that the Fates were conspiring to tip over the world, there were now only two, and no personification could think of that incident without cringing. The mess that had followed the demise of the Crone was nearly enough to rival the Glass Clock of Bad Shuschein in grandeur, but unlike the clock it had been up to all the other personifications to fix it. The Mother had gotten her great-granddaughter to pick up the slack eventually, but the ramifications were still being felt—people's fates got cross-wired all the time, with the result that more often than not the princess turned into a frog instead of the other way round, and the swineherd who was heir of the kingdom usually wound up selling meat pies at the corner market.

"Yeah, but who would it be?" demanded War. "Nobody ever goes after _us,_ and we're supposedly the bad guys. I could see somebody wanting to take Death out, but I can't see even a complete loony actually _trying_ it. Most humans think we're invisible."

"Invincible," muttered Pestilence. "Well...maybe it's not a human, eh? Maybe it's them little grey buggers again."

They thought about this for a moment. Had they been more like gods and less like humans, they might have worked it out for themselves, but humanity, when it stumbles across the truth, usually just picks itself up and continues on, and that was what the three now did.

"Maybe Death knows," Famine said. "Could always ask him."

"Oh, are we going visiting, then?" piped in Mrs. War, plunking down a plate of eggs and ham. "Just let me get my good hat, there's some good lads. And don't forget your scarf, dear, it's a bit nippy outside."

The three eyed one another, but did not speak. For them paying a visit to Death had been merely a hypothetical musing, but there was no gainsaying Mrs. War, and who knew, maybe the old boy would actually know something.

"Well, let's find him, then," said War, wrapping his scarf around his neck. He didn't notice the looks the other two gave him, nor if he had would he have understood that it just wasn't _right _to see the personification of conflict and strife wearing something made of wooly lavender.

"Nothing's what it used to be, that's what," mused Pestilence, as Mrs. War, in a hat almost large enough to qualify for its own postcode, came out leading their horses. They mounted up and cantered off, in search of nobody quite knew what.

———

The door of Granny Weatherwax's cottage burst open, emitting not only Granny but Nanny, Agnes, and a very disheveled Magrat, who was trying futilely to convince a flock of starlings that her hair would _not _make an ideal nest.

"'Ere, you lot, out of my garden!" Granny snapped, brandishing her broom at them. "That's my potatoes you're standin' in, and just _look_ at those carrots..."

Ridcully guiltily stepped out of the way, eying Granny closely—she certainly didn't _look _as though she'd gone and pulled a Black Aliss, but then with Granny looks didn't mean much. Still, he was somewhat comforted by the presence of the other witches—if they were still putting up with her, she probably wasn't being any nastier than usual.

Granny's eyes took in the small mob that stood crowded on her front lawn. "I'm thinkin' I know why you're here," she said, crossing her arms. "It's that business up north, ain't it?"

Vimes blinked. He wasn't a well-traveled man, but thanks to Sybil he was a well-read one, and he knew enough to recognize a witch when he saw one. They had a few even in Ankh-Morpork, and it was best to show them some respect, if you valued all your limbs.

"Morning, Mistress," he said, removing his hat. "I don't know much about the business up north, but I _do_ know that somebody's kidnapped our Patrician and taken him to the Ramtops, so I'm assuming we're on the same page."

Granny's eyes traveled to Death, who stood with one hand on Binky's bridle. "He's not all they've kidnapped," she muttered. "I'm takin' it that's why you're here?"

OF COURSE.

"And you lot," she said, looking to the wizards, "you'd've felt it, same as we did. Whatever it is, it's wrong, and you know it."

Ridcully didn't know what to say, but Ponder and the Librarian nodded.

"Ook," said the Librarian, helpfully.

"But what about _that_ one?" Granny pointed to Life, who was apparently holding a conversation with one of the lawn gnomes.

"I was wondering that myself," said Ridcully. "I don't suppose she's one of yours?" he said to Vimes.

Death sighed. NO, he said. THAT, I AM AFRAID, IS LIFE. WAS LIFE. IS SUPPOSED TO BE LIFE. SHE'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE _HERE_, HOWEVER.

Life looked up at him and grinned. "Boogaloo," she said, and fell over.

A small silence followed.

"_That's_ Life?" Ponder demanded, incredulity plastered over his face like a custard pie. "She's...er...not what I expected."

YOU COULD SAY THAT AGAIN, muttered Death. JOIE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? he demanded. I TOLD YOU TO STAY WITH ALBERT.

"I did," she said, picking at her big toe. "He's over there." She pointed to a slumped, shabby figure that was currently snoring under a fir tree. What looked for all the world like an impromptu lifetimer hung around his neck on a chain, filled with sand that sat stationary in the top bulb. "'m s'posed to be _here_, not there. Anyway, _he's _here."

WHO'S HERE?

"My...exper'ment. Gotta keep an eye on him, I do."

Death shook his head, deciding he really didn't want to ask.

WELL THEN, he said, looking around. I DON'T SUPPOSE ANYBODY KNOWS WHAT'S GOING ON HERE, DO THEY?

The wizards and Granny all opened their mouths at once, but nobody got a chance to speak—hoofbeats sounded in the distance, quite a lot of them, and the little crowed turned to behold a veritable army thundering towards the, coming straight out of the clouds.

——

Even The Mended Drum tended to experience a lull in the mornings, due mainly to the fact that most of its regulars were still too sick to think about drinking again. Being the Mended Drum, it saw all types of customers, and so it was that the bartender didn't look twice when a small, fat cherub with ridiculously undersized wings fluttered in, set down an unlikely-looking bow and quiver of arrows, and ordered half a pint of scumble. Hibiscus poured without comment and left the creature to drown its sorrows as best it could, being very careful not to touch the arrows. They had hearts instead of points, and Hibiscus trusted hearts about as much as he trusted Chrysoprase the troll.

The cherub was depressed. Here it was, St. Wossname's Day, and hardly anybody had remembered. Scarce a box of chocolates had been bought, nary a card, and as for heart-shaped balloons—

He sighed, downing half the scumble at one go and emitting a very un-cherubic belch. People just didn't appreciate romance any more, that was what. He might as well be a postman, for all anybody cared about his work—nobody knew how hard it was, making sure he shot the right people, at the right time, in the right place. It was no joke, being a Cupid, but nobody realized that; nobody understood just what would happen if he got it even the slightest bit wrong. People didn't _want_ the attentions of Cupids anymore—they were too busy going on about Free Will and all that rot.

He burped again. May as well retire, he thought. Give it up, go out with a bang, earn his gold watch—

Wait. An idea was forming in his tiny little brain, an idea borne of frustration and alcohol and chemicals no living being should ever, ever imbibe. He'd show them, he thought, tipping back the last of his drink and immediately ordering another. Oh, yes indeed he would. Being what he was, he knew where everybody was at all times, and there was a fair gathering going on up in the Ramtops...

It was perfect. It was more than perfect, it was _divine_, the sort of opportunity one dreamed about but seldom actually experienced. He would go to the Ramtops, and then, and then—

—and then he would show them what St. Wossname's Day was _really_ about.

———

The sleepy kingdom of Lancre had never seen such an uproar.

News of Pestilence, War, and Famine's journey had gotten around, mainly because just about everybody like them was thinking along the same lines. As a result nearly every anthropomorphic personification on the whole of the Disc had converged on Granny Weatherwax's backyard , their horses snorting and stamping and tearing up the lawn, while the wizards and the Watchmen fought to avoid being trampled.

Vimes drew his squad aside, letting everybody else get on with it—he didn't hold with messing about in the affairs of magical people (or personifications, if it came to that), if only because those who did often ended up in some other form than their natural. He didn't know what they were all on about, but his mission was clear: they had to first locate the Patrician, and then rescue him. Whatever anybody else wanted to do was their own damn business.

He surveyed his crew with some inner misgivings. He'd chosen Nobby, Colon, and Angua to accompany him—the former two because he didn't dare leave them behind in the city, and Angua because he felt she might actually be useful. He'd wanted to bring Carrot along as well, but somebody had to be left in charge of the Watch in his absence, and Carrot was the only one he could think of who wouldn't let the power go to his head, or let those who wanted the power put anything sharp and pointy in the rest of him. They were currently sitting on a swinging bench in what remained of the flower garden, watching the rest of the milling crowd with undeniable interest—most of them had seen Death at one point or another, but the rest of this lot were strangers, and looking at them made Death seem almost normal.

Death himself was currently surrounded by War, Famine, Pestilence, the two Fate Sisters and their apprentice, Chaos, Destiny (a cousin of the Fates), Lobsang, and a score or so others that even he was having a hard time identifying. Justice, blind as a bat, was wiffling around here and there and occasionally crashing into trees, and Life was perched on the top of Granny's chimney, peppering them with rotten potatoes whenever she felt they needed it.

There was a reason that anthropomorphic personifications seldom gathered together, and this was a prime example of it. Whenever more than four of them were in the same spot, they inevitably fell to bickering, as the nature of their jobs meant that someone was always buggering up somebody else's work. There was among them a kind of power hierarchy, based both on how much people believed in them and how much the work they did affected the world, but nobody wanted to admit that—in each of their minds they were supreme, _their _work was the most important, and everybody else was just in the way.

The only one exempt from this rule was Death himself. This wasn't because he tried, it was just because, in the end, he undid _all_ their work—everything died eventually, even, sometimes, a personification, if the world at large had no more use for it. He was oldest, and as a result he was the only one who got anything even remotely resembling respect.

Nanny, practical soul that she was, did not know nor care where all these people had come from—she just knew they were all probably going to want to eat, so she'd summoned a veritable phalanx of daughters-in-law and set them to cooking for the mob, supervising from a rocking chair with a pipe in her mouth and Greebo in her lap. Magrat, as queen, felt it her duty to welcome all these strange people, but even a witch has a limit to how much sheer absurdity she can deal with, and she and Agnes now sat not far from the Watchmen, wondering idly if things could get any more chaotic. Only Granny dared actually approach the mob, on the sheer principal that this was her land and her cottage, and if Destiny didn't get her bloody boots out of the pea-patch she was going to get a right hard wallop with the poker. She'd already chased Binky out of the garden three times, endured him drooling on her ear, and finally said that if they were going to stand about and gab all day they could ruddy well do it somewhere else.

All the personifications turned to her, shocked at her audacity, but one look at Granny Weatherwax was enough to convince most of them to keep their mouths shut. Only Life, still perched atop the chimney, responded, though her response consisted of knocking Granny's hat off with a ballistic potato and then falling off the chimney in a fit of off-key giggling.

Death took the opportunity presented by the momentary silence to finally get a word in edgewise.

SHE HAS A POINT, he said. IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T NOTICED, WE HAVE A BIT OF A PROBLEM HERE, AND IF YOU'LL ALL KEEP QUIET FOR FIVE MINUTES, I THINK I KNOW WHAT IT MIGHT BE.

They looked at him expectantly, even Life, who had gone cross-eyed.

I TRUST YOU ALL KNOW THAT ONE OF US HAS BEEN MISSING FOR QUITE SOME TIME, he said, stalking across the garden and putting his foot right in the biggest pansy, earning himself a withering glare from Granny. LIFE WANDERED OFF TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO, AND NOBODY KNEW WHERE. UNTIL NOW.

He hauled Joie/Life to her feet, steadying her as she threatened to tip over backwards again. Her protuberant eyes regarded the crowd with their usual slightly unfocused squint, and she let out a small, almost ladylike burp in greeting. She'd lost her hair towel somewhere along the way, and the wild white mass of her hair stood around her face in a hopeless (but fortunately now clean) tangle.

Pestilence coughed. "You've got to be kidding," he said. "_Her?_"

HER, Death confirmed, grabbing the back of Joie's dressing-gown as she tried to wander off in pursuit of a passing butterfly. I FOUND HER IN ANKH-MORPORK, AND I BELIEVE SHE MAY BE THE ONE WHATEVER IS UP HERE IS TARGETING.

They stared. Death sighed.

I HAVE SEEN IT. THE AUDITORS HAVE FOUND ONE MAD ENOUGH TO ATTEMPT TO KILL LIFE, AND HAVE SET HIM UP WITH THE POWERS TO DO SO. He paused. THEY HAVE ALSO GIVEN HIM MY GRANDDAUGHTER.

Lobsang choked, his face going quite white. "_What?_" he demanded. Sparks flew from his fingertips as he clenched his hands, causing all and sundry to look at him curiously.

If Death could have raised an eyebrow, he would have. INDEED, he said. STRICTLY SPEAKING SUSAN MOST LIKELY DOES NOT NEED MY HELP, BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT. I HAVE A CERTAIN...FAMILIAL OBLIGATION TO RESCUE HER, WHETHER SHE NEEDS IT OR NOT. AFTER ALL, he mused, I CERTAINLY OWE HER ONE.

Lobsang drew a slow, deep breath, obviously willing the human part of himself into the background. "Where is she?" he asked, not bothering to prevaricate.

Death looked around at all of them, and extended a hand. FOLLOW ME, he said.

———

He was almost there. Cupids, strictly speaking, didn't have all the powers normally granted an anthropomorphic personification, but they could bend Time enough to get wherever they wanted to go in a hurry. He was somewhat hampered by the sheer amount of alcohol he had consumed, and almost impaled himself on a semaphore tower, but he was determined that this was one St. Wossname's Day that _nobody_ would ever forget.

———

The castle was typical for the Ramtops, at least from the outside—it was a vast, sprawling thing that looked as though it had grown out of the mountains themselves. Guards, mostly zombies, patrolled the walls, and even the personifications took care to remain out of arrow-range.

IT'S IN THERE, Death said. WHATEVER IT IS. SO IS SUSAN, AND SO, I BELIEVE, IS YOUR PATRICIAN. He nodded to Vimes and his squadron, who were regarding the castle with a bemused expression that said as clearly as words, "Oh, _hell_ no."

War regarded the castle closely. He'd seen many more impressive, but there was something distinctly unnatural about this one, something that told him assailing it would be a very bad idea. The best idea would be to besiege it, starve them out, and he said so. Granny shook her head.

"I'm not sure we've got time for that," she said, squinting at the distant parapets. "Whatever's goin' on, seems to me it's not goin' to wait around. No, I reckon we've got to use headology on 'em."

"What's that?" War asked, puzzled.

"We make 'em _think_ they're starvin'," she said.

"Oh, I say, jolly good idea," said Famine.

"Yeah, but how do we know they won't start eating one another if we do?" asked Magrat. They all turned and stared at her, which of course caused her to go red as a beet.

"Well, it's just, if they're that bad, it's something they'd do, right?"

"Girl's got a point," Nanny muttered, shaking her head. "I don't half like it."

"Maybe if we dug a tunnel?" Nobby suggested. "You know, come up right under 'em like gophers."

"Wouldn't work," Granny said. "Not without some dwarfs, and they'd make such a racket we'd never get away with it. You can't dig a tunnel in the Ramtops; you've got to blast one."

Death sighed. They'd never get anywhere like this, he thought, but what else was there to do? There had to be some way into that castle, but he knew without even trying that simply attempting to walk in wouldn't work. Technically Death could go anywhere in the world, but he could _feel_ the barrier around this place—it was magic, all right, and more than magic; he knew full well that the only way he would get into that castle was if somebody died.

It was at that thought that something came hurtling over the castle wall, a flail of limbs and a terrified shriek, and landed directly on his head.

———

And he was here. The world spun and dipped fantastically, and everything in his vision was trebled, but he was here, and _they_ were here, and that was all that mattered. They stretched out below him, watching a castle in the distance, perfect sitting ducks. He didn't care about the castle—he'd deal with that later—right now he cared about _them_.

He unshouldered his bow and nocked an arrow, doing his level best to aim, and fired.

———

Death stood up, shaking his head, and looked down at the thing that had landed on top of him.

It was a person, of sorts, though at the moment it was so tangled in robes that it was hard to tell up from down. It sat up, adjusted its pointy hat, took one good look at him, gave a small "Eeep" of terror, and fell over in a dead faint.

Death prodded him with a toe, regarding him quizzically. He knew who this was—it was that bloody wizard Rincewind, the one who kept miraculously staying alive when by all rights he shouldn't, including right now. _Nothing_ should be able to survive a landing like that, but quite obviously he had. He took out the young man's lifetimer, puzzled, and saw to his considerable confusion that sand was flowing _backward _through it, up into the top bulb.

"Rincewind!"

Joie, weaving and bobbing drunkenly in what he was learning to be her customary walk, stumbled over and sat down beside the unconscious wizard, patting him on the head as though he were a small puppy. "Oh, good, nothin' broken. Wake up now, there's a good lad."

Death started to say something, but something slammed into his back with a considerable sting. He looked up, just in time to see a veritable hail of arrows come sailing out of the sky, peppering the crowd like, well, pepper. One of them caught Granny Weatherwax in the foot, making her hop and curse, while another impaled Agnes' forehead and promptly disappeared. A third stuck through the top of Nanny Ogg's hat, while a fourth caught Nobby square in the stomach.

"We're being bombed!" cried the Oh God of Hangovers, who had appeared from seemingly nowhere. He dove behind a rock, but not before catching an arrow right in the bum.

There followed a confusion so great that even Chaos couldn't have done a better job. The only person who seemed to keep his head was Vimes, who picked up a rock and launched it at their attacker. It hit him in the head and dropped him like a stone, bow, arrows and all, and he and the other two uninjured Watchmen hurried over to it.

"What in blazes is _that?_" Colon demanded, eying the cherub as though uncertain it was really there.

"I think it's a Cupid," Angua said, prodding it with her boot. "It _is _St. Wossname's Day, after all."

"Is it?" said Vimes, giving a guilty start. He hadn't remembered to get Sybil anything, but then, she hadn't gotten _him _anything, either. Apparently it wasn't a very memorable holiday.

Something clicked in his head. "Wait a minute," he said. "If that's a Cupid, and it's just shot half of us—" He stopped, looking around at all the various people rubbing at their now non-existent wounds. "Oh, bugger."

This, he thought, was _not _going to end well.


	5. The Joye of Snackes

Perpetrator's Note: Heeheehee...this chapter we find out just how sad and bitter will be the consequences of Cupid's drunken rampage, Susan and Vetinari team up against Teatime, Rincewind is...well, Rincewind, and everything generally goes from bad to worse, with a special guest appearance by everyone's favorite little blue people (and no, I don't mean the Smurfs). Sorry this one took so long--I moved last month, and as consequence everything, including my writing, went straight to hell for a while, until I managed to get organized again. Hopefully the next chapter will be up in short order. :-D

Though it was no longer common knowledge in Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari had been trained as an Assassin, and he'd been a damned good one. Though it had been years since he'd put that training to any practical use, he was still quite up on the theory, and it was easy enough for him to recognize that Teatime had been brought up in the same school. It was also easy enough to see that while Teatime might be mad as a hatter, he was far from stupid, and was therefore unlikely to fall victim to any of the standard methods of assassination.

On a certain level Vetinari disliked the idea of inhuming someone without payment, but in this case he felt he would be doing a service for all of mankind. Like most Assassins, he had had very strict standards, and one look at Teatime was enough to offend just about all of them. Quite apart from the personal inconvenience of being trapped gods alone knew how far from his fragile city, being in the young man's presence was like being trapped in a room full of cockroaches.

He was sitting behind the desk in his chambers, his thin, blue-veined hands folded before him in contemplation, when something thudded into the outside of his door, followed by a muffled curse. Shortly thereafter the door opened, admitting a disheveled young woman in strict schoolteacher's black, her white, black-streaked hair drawn back into what might have once been a bun. She had a lump on her forehead, and looked ready to disembowel the first creature unfortunate enough to get in her way.

Vetinari watched her impassively. "Can I help you?" he asked, in the carefully bland voice that made most of his underlings squirm.

Susan rubbed her forehead and made an attempt to push the hair out of her eyes. "Lord Vetinari?" she said, shutting the door.

"Indeed," he said. "And you would be, let me see...Susan Sto-Helit?" He had only seen her once, and that some years ago, at a party thrown by the Dowager Duchess of Quirm, but hair like that wasn't easily forgotten. "So sorry to hear about your parents."

Susan blinked. "Erm, yes. Look, you and I appear to have the same problem, which is that we're here, rather than, well, anywhere else. I think perhaps we should do something about that." She sat on a great, heavy oaken chest and crossed her arms, doing her best to appear businesslike.

Vetinari rested his hands on the desk-blotter, grateful to finally be in the presence of someone who hadn't been behind the door when common sense was handed out. "What, precisely, did you have in mind?" he asked.

"A Cupid?" said Colon, eying the obese (and currently very unconscious) cherub. "You mean, them little fat buggers that shoot you with their arrows and--oh," he said, suddenly comprehending. "Oh. Right. Erm...I don't suppose those arrows've got an antidote, do they?" he asked helplessly, looking around at the crowd.

"Somehow that would be too convenient," Vimes muttered, picking the thing up by an ankle and eying it critically. It wasn't much of a cherub--it had the high, choleric color of something that had drunk far too much scumble, and it reeked of things he'd rather not think of. "Nobby, you all right? Nobby?"

He turned, just in time to see Nobby go down on one knee before the squat, dumpy witch and throw up his arms in a theatrical gesture. The proscribed format dictated poetry at this point, but, poetry not being Nobby's strong suite, he instead opted for verse fourteen of the Hedgehog Song, complete with pantomime.

"What's that he's singin'?" Colon asked, and Angua choked when Nobby got to the line about the horse, stuffing a fist in her mouth to stifle the giggles. The witch, far from looking offended, was grinning down at Nobby like someone confronting a hitherto undiscovered soulmate.

"Don't ask," Vimes muttered, silently debating whether it was worth it to try and save Nobby from himself.

Nobby wasn't the only one who'd apparently gone off his nut. The Oh God of Hangovers had sidled up to Justice and was attempting a cool lean against a handy tree, apparently completely unaware of the fact that she was stone blind, and Agnes took one look at the oh god and flushed red as a beet. Magrat glanced sharply at Granny, who for several long seconds stood perfectly rigid, her sapphire eyes staring blankly, and then--

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, and, er, tumpty-tumpty," she said, striding through the long grass, her heavy boots leaving small canyons in her wake. "Thou art more, er, than a wossname, and...tumpty-tum." She seized Albert's hand, pulled him upright, and smacked him several times to make sure he was conscious.

Magrat's jaw dropped. For a moment dead silence fell, as all and sundry, even Nobby, turned to stare at the witch. Albert, for once in his life utterly pole-axed, gaped at her.

Magrat turned to Agnes, whose blush had deepened to the hue of old port. "I don't know who I _am_ anymore," she said helplessly.

"Urg," agreed Agnes.

Granny turned to them, and whatever her mouth had said, her eyes told them quite clearly that she knew what was going on, and didn't like it a bit. However, some things are stronger even than the will of a Weatherwax, and like it or not she was in its clutches.

"Oh dear," Nanny muttered, disentangling herself from Nobby's faltered soliloquy and hurrying over to Granny. "Now, Esme, I'm sure it's only tempr'ry, just come along and have a lie-down..." She shot a worried glance at Magrat, who was still gawping at Granny as though she'd sprouted a second head, and dragged Granny off as quickly as she could.

"Wait!" Nobby cried, and, grubby helmet in his hands, he hurried off after Nanny, moving as fast as his short legs could carry him. "Wait, lady, I wasn't done yet!"

"Oh, bloody hell," Vimes sighed. "Nobby!"

"Leave him be, Commander," Angua said. "It'll run its course...whatever it is."

Albert opened and closed his mouth a few times, before apparently remembering who he was and that he was not, in fact, on Planet Oddball. He turned to Death, who was holding one of the heart-tipped arrows in his hand, turning it this way and that as if in an attempt to analyze it. Albert paled.

"You all right, Master?" he asked, his heart seeming to drop into his stomach like a lead weight. "Not been hit, have you?"

Death started. SORRY, he said. WOOLGATHERING, I EXPECT. NO, I WAS HIT, BUT...BUT... He drew himself up to his full height, trying to collect his scattered wits. BUT OF COURSE, WE PERSONIFICATIONS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO...ER...THESE...

Albert glanced at the oh god, whose attempts to suavely smooth back his hair would have gone over a lot better if he hadn't had a few of last night's peas nesting in his curls. "...Right you are, Master," he said hopelessly.

Rincewind, who had taken the attack of the Cupid as a cue to faint again, found himself being none-too-gently slapped back into the land of the aware. "Murfle?" he said, opening his eyes. "Whowhanow?"

Life beamed down at him in her slightly muzzy way. "Now, now, wake up," she said, dragging him to his feet. She produced a handkerchief from gods only knew where and held it out. "Spit," she commanded, and somewhat hesitantly Rincewind did so. She then applied the handkerchief to his face, straightened his hat, and patted him on the shoulder. "There's a good lad...wha' happened in there?"

Rincewind looked back at the high walls and shuddered. "Erm, well, that is, there was this...man, I think, and he...he made me transport all sorts of people, and then he got tired of me so he loaded me into a catapult and...well, I wound up out here." He shook his head violently, sending his pointy hat flying. "And I'm glad I'm well out of there, too...he's a loony, he is."

Vimes shook his head. "Wait a minute," he said, trying valiantly to wrap his brain around that statement. "You got flung out of the castle with a catapult and survived?"

HE'S GOOD AT THAT, Death muttered sourly.

"Well, yes, obviously," said Rincewind, casting a nervous glance at Death and edging almost imperceptibly away. "He's off his gourd, too, if you ask me."

Vimes shook his head, not wanting to deal with any of this. "At least you didn't get shot," he said, and sighed. "Angua, do me a favor and try to pry Nobby away from the witch, all right? She can't be appreciating the attention, and the last thing we need is a disgruntled witch."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," said Magrat, as Angua went off to find Nobby. "I mean, she's let Casanunda try, and he's, well...a bit _special_, if you take my meaning."

Vimes considered this, and discovered that the thought of Nobby courting a witch was made doubly horrifying when one added the prospect of the witch enjoying it. "...I didn't need to know that," he said grimly, and shook himself. "Look, this is getting us nowhere...we need to figure out how to get into that castle."

Lobsang, who had somehow avoided the barrage of arrows, gave the pile of stone a thoughtful look. "I don't see why we--that is, the personifications--shouldn't be able to get inside," he said. "After all, there isn't anywhere we can't go."

Death, who had clearly still been woolgathering, straightened. NO, he said. THE AUDITORS WILL HAVE SEEN TO THAT...WE CANNOT ENTER UNTIL BIDDEN.

"What does that mean?" Lobsang asked, scowling at the parapets as though willing them to crumble under the sheer force of his glare.

IT MEANS, ROUGHLY, THAT UNTIL SOMETHING HAPPENS THAT WILL GIVE US A DOORWAY, WE CANNOT ENTER. IN MY CASE, SOMEONE MUST DIE.

"Shouldn't be too hard, then, with that nutter in charge," Rincewind said, picking up his pointy hat and attempting to flip it right-side-out.

Death looked thoughtful. NO, he said. THEY WILL BE MORE CAREFUL THAN THAT...THEY DO NOT WANT ANY OF US INTERFERING.

"So what do we do, then?" Vimes demanded. The sun was already westering, and if they were going to do anything before dark, they would have to do it soon.

Death considered a moment. I SUGGEST, he said, THAT WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT DINNER.

Nanny Ogg had had many suitors over the course of her life, but never one quite like Nobby. It hadn't taken her five minutes of knowing him to realize that here was a creature subtly akin to herself, someone else who had that special type of cheerful, leering lechery branded into their very soul. Sure, there was an undeniable height differential, but Casanunda had been shorter...she had very quickly weighed her options, and decided to see what the little man would do.

She had taken Granny away into the woods, doing her best to provide some sort of comfort, and Nobby hovered at her elbow like an anxious bantam hen, offering what he thought were helpful suggestions, like, "Dump some icewater on her head, works a treat for me." Nanny didn't know what would happen to anyone who tried dumping icewater on Esme, and she didn't particularly want to find out, either.

"How about we just let her have a bit of time to herself," she said, and caught Granny's grateful look. Nanny had known Granny long enough to realize that something like this, something she couldn't control, would be sheer torture, and it would be best for everybody if she had a little time to at least try and collect herself.

They wandered off into the woods, the fading sunlight gilding the needles of the evergreens, and nearly tripped over Mustrum Ridcully, who was muttering furiously to himself and winding his crossbow. He spared a brief glance at them and went back to business, grumbling the whole time. All Nanny caught was, "--don't care if he _was_ the greatest wizard of all time, I'll settle 'im--" before they had passed out of earshot.

"Wonder what that was about?" Nobby said, almost skipping to keep up with Nanny. She was not a tall woman, but she could roll along at a pace that would put a yeti to shame, and Nobby's short legs were no match for her.

"I've got a pretty good idea," Nanny said darkly. "Anyways, now that Esme's settled for a bit--"

She stopped. Something had rustled in the bushes to the left, something small but extremely speedy. It was followed by a second, and then a third, and then all at once the undergrowth around them was filled with the sound of many tiny feet running at full stampede.

"What the bloody--" Nobby started, but Nanny silenced him with an outstretched hand. He listened a moment, and then realized he could hear small, shrill cries amid the minute din.

"Buggert'lightnin'!"  
"Mor powert' ye!"

"Nac mac Feegle!"

Nanny smiled, splitting her face into a thousand tiny wrinkles as the herd passed them by. "Bit early this year, but good timin', I'd say," she said.

"What was that?" Nobby asked, turning and watching the slowly retreating rustle of bushes.

"The Nac mac Feegle--come and raid my still every year. Tricky little blighters, but if we can get them on our side, whatever's in that castle doesn't stand the chance of a scarecrow in a brush-fire."

"And if we can't?"

"Then it won't matter what he does--we won't be alive enough to care."

Nobby considered this. "Cheerful," he said, and would have said more, save that Angua finally caught up with them. A Ramtops forest is filled with all sorts of highly individualized smells, but nothing on all the Disc could possibly smell quite like Nobby, and she had found him easily enough.

"Vimes wants to see you, Nobby," she said, quite relieved that she had found him before he'd been able to, erm, press his suit in any earnest. "They've started dinner." She sniffed. "Or something like it," she added dubiously.

Nobby sighed, but Nanny tipped him a wink to let him know all was not lost. She knew all too well that his attention was entirely the cupid's doing, but she hardly cared--there was something rather taking about the little runt, she reflected, and whatever was to come of it, it promised to be damned interesting.

The sun was slanting redly through the castle windows when Teatime skipped down the stairs to the dungeons. He didn't have anyone in them--yet--but he wanted to visit his head chef, who, being a vampire, had insisted on setting up shop as far from natural sunlight as was possible to get.

The chef's name was Illya, and he was a seven-year Black Ribboner. Like all vampires who chose to abstain from human blood, he had to replace his platelet-fixation with some other obsession, and he had settled on cookery. He had been working in a five-star restaurant in Ankh-Morpork before he woke up and found himself here, and with a pragmatism only the undead can feel he had shrugged and gotten to work. He didn't particularly care _where_ he cooked, just so long as his utensils and ingredients were top-of-the-line, and nobody tried to get in his way. So far as that went, Teatime's castle was perfect.

Teatime knocked politely before entering the kitchen, and found Illya carefully icing the last of a tray of small white cupcakes, all delicately frosted with confectioner's sugar. Rack upon rack of various pastries stood on the wall beyond, and the entire place smelt like a diabetic's worst nightmare.

"Hello, sir," said the vampire. "Almost done vith these...the little cream puffs are ze vorst."

"Very good." Teatime, being rather a psychotic perfectionist himself, appreciated the quality in other people as well. "Illya, I need you to do something for me," he said, hopping up onto a stool.

"Yes?" Illya laid aside his frosting-bag. "It better not involve marzipan, I don't haff anymore."

"No, no. At least, I don't think so." Teatime regarded his chef curiously. Vampires were reputed to have a wonderful way with women, something that he himself (apparently) sadly lacked. "I need you to make me a special dinner--you know, the sort that a woman would like. Candles, and...you know, candles and things."

Illya's red eyes lit up. "Ah," he said. "You vant to impress a lady, no? You came to ze right place...ladies always appreciate a romantic meal."

"You can do it, then?"

"Oh, off course...it vould be my pleasure. I haven't been able to sink my teeth into a good romantic dinner in ages."

Teatime considered this sentence a moment, and decided that the vampire really didn't realize what it sounded like. "Very good...have it served in the north tower; I've got some of the seamstresses decorating it right now." He hopped off the stool and left the vampire to do what he would, fully confident that Illya knew what he was doing. Teatime had done some more reading, and was fairly certain it wasn't standard queen behavior to slap your future husband every time he opened his mouth, and he was certain that something like this would help. Women liked that kind of thing, right?

He wandered off, humming idly to himself, and when he was gone Illya shut and bolted the door and then took a book down from the highest of his bookshelves. He'd never had a chance to try it out yet, and he was anxious to see if it could really do all that it claimed--it said it was written by a witch, but then, you never knew. Like all his cookbooks, this one was lovingly kept in perfect condition, and he let his fingers wander over the title before opening it. It said, in fancy copperplate lettering, _The Joye of Snackes._

A number of campfires winked into life as the sun sank lower, several aided by fireballs from impatient wizards. Vimes, Angua, Nobby, the Bursar, Rincewind, Lobsang, and Life all sat about one, toasting various field rations on sticks, while at other fires the personifications did what they did best, which was quarrel amongst one another like children (or, thought Rincewind, wizards), and the other wizards came up with ever more grandiose (and ever more ridiculous) schemes for getting into the castle.

Vimes found, to his surprise, that he was rather enjoying himself. He had never been a military man, and certainly wilderness was an entirely alien concept to him, but he found that he felt at home here--it was rather like huddling around a chestnut-seller's barrel back home in Ankh-Morpork, and out here one could see stars that never would have been visible through the city's ever-present haze.

True, he was having to keep a sharp eye on Nobby, but that wasn't very difficult--Nobby, against all knowledge and expectation of his character, was sitting with a small tablet on his knees and his tongue between his teeth, laboriously attempting to compose an original verse to the Hedgehog Song. Vimes had considered pointing out that poetry was usually more acceptable, but one good look at Nanny Ogg had changed his mind on that one.

Angua, meanwhile, had actually managed to engage Life in a more or less coherent conversation, and had found that while she wasn't always all there, she was wonderfully sympathetic. The two talked in the complicated code of women that still, even after several years of marriage, floated straight over Vimes's head, while Rincewind attempted to toast half a loaf of pumpernickel and set the sleeve of his robe on fire. The Bursar occasionally came out of his happy stupor long enough to make a contribution (though it rarely had any bearing on the current conversation), while Lobsang sat and scowled at the castle so blackly that Vimes wondered that it didn't burst into flames from the sheer force of malevolence. Blue sparks occasionally snapped from his fingers, making Vimes edge away. Wizards he could deal with, but anthropomorphic personifications were something else entirely.

The witches sat at the next fire over, cooking something in a large cauldron that Nanny had procured from the gods alone knew where. Nanny chattered cheerfully, in her usual fashion, but Granny, who had returned looking pale but composed, sat in silence. The others made no effort to engage her in conversation, feeling it wisest to let her alone, and if Granny noticed that Ridcully was watching her like a hawk, she gave no sign.

Albert, the raven, and the Death of Rats had a fire all to themselves, as far away from the witches as could be. Albert sat frying bacon and casting suspicious glances Granny-ward, and wishing that he knew where in the hell the Master was--Death had disappeared some time ago, leaving Binky to graze on the sweet Lancre hill-grass.

Nanny was just ladling out some stew when a tall, dark figure appeared at her elbow, and made her nearly drop her bowl in the cauldron.

EXCUSE ME, MRS. OGG, BUT COULD I HAVE A WORD WITH YOU?

Nanny peered up into the gloom. Witches, of course, know when they are going to die, so Death held no terror for her. She couldn't imagine what the Grim Reaper would want to talk to her about, but she went off gamely enough, to a distance just far enough from all of the fires to avoid being overheard.

"Yes?" she said, sitting comfortably on a large mossy boulder.

It is impossible for a seven-foot skeleton to look uncomfortable, but Death was coming close. He leaned the scythe against a tree and sat as well, picking at nonexistent threads on the sleeve of his robe.

ERM, REALLY, THIS IS MOST DIFFICULT, he said. I WAS WONDERING IF...GIVEN YOUR EXPERIENCE...IF YOU COULD POSSIBLY..."

Nanny arched an eyebrow. "Possibly what?"

Death looked as agonized as a skull can, which under the circumstances was quite well. I NEED...ER...ADVICE.

Both of Nanny's brows shot up. "_You_ need advice? About what?"

Death looked around, to make sure nobody was about, and said in a whisper like the thud of a falling tombstone, ER...WOMEN.

Nanny stared. It wasn't often that Gytha Ogg was completely pole-axed, but she was now and no mistake.

"You...want..._what?"_ she demanded, for once unable to process what she had heard.

ADVICE, Death said again, just as quietly, ABOUT...WOMEN.

Nanny blinked. And blinked again. "Why?" she asked.

Now it was Death who was taken rather aback. WHY NOT?

"Well, it's just...with your line of work, I didn't think it was...that is, I didn't think you'd...who is she?" Whatever else she was, Nanny Ogg was both an inveterate meddler in other people's affairs and an incurable gossip, and to be able to break the news that Death had an _object d'affection_, as she thought of it, would make her day for a year.

THAT'S...NOT IMPORTANT. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS...WHAT DO WOMEN LIKE? DIAMONDS, CHOCOLATE, THINGS OF THAT NATURE?

"Well, yes, usually...it depends on the woman, really. Some women are all for glitz and glitter, while others like...oh, I don't know, something more personal." Nanny considered. "You could try cooking her dinner."

DINNER? WOMEN ARE PLEASED BY MEN WHO COOK FOR THEM?

"Well, yes. Means we don't have to, see. It's thoughtful, like."

THOUGHTFUL. I SEE. Death considered this. WHAT SORT OF FOOD DO WOMEN LIKE, BESIDES CHOCOLATE?

And it was that, really, that caused ninety percent of the mess that followed. Nanny Ogg was, as Granny had often said, an imp for mischief, and Death had all unknowingly handed her the perfect opportunity to sow some.

"Well, funny you should mention it," she said. She stood and turned around, and after much tortured twanging of elastic produced a small, slim volume, which she handed to him. "Wrote the book on that one, you might say."

Death looked at it. THE JOYE OF SNACKES, he said, bemused. THERE IS HAPPINESS IN FOOD?

"There can be," Nanny assured him. "Provided you use it right."

Death flipped through the pages, glancing over the recipes. AND THIS WILL WORK?

"It's never failed yet," Nanny said, suppressing a snigger. "Has the Nanny Ogg guarantee."

Death brightened visibly. WELL THEN, he said. COOKING. I SHALL COOK. I'M GOOD AT THAT.

He left for his own fire, leaving Nanny shaking from head to foot with quiet laughter. She knew that she probably shouldn't have done that, but when faced with irresistible temptation Nanny had no choice but to give in, as her fifteen children attested to. She'd give her right ear to know how Death's culinary endeavors turned out, and was quite grateful she was in a good position to observe. In several hours she would not be nearly so grateful, but for now she all but hugged herself with glee as she wandered back to the others.

Granny stirred when she sat down, casting a beady eye on her. "What have you been up to, Gytha?" she asked suspiciously.

"Oh, nothin', Esme," Nanny said, her face a picture of innocence. "Nothin' at all."

Susan was back in her own room when Teatime came looking for her. Now that her temper had settled to a slow simmer she realized that she might as well make the best of things, until she and Vetinari perfected their budding plot, so she had had a bath and had done the best she could with her schoolteacher's outfit, which had definitely suffered from her trip with the zombie. She flatly refused to wear any of the dripping creations in the wardrobe--they were the sort of thing that silly, soppy, romantic girls wore, and she'd be damned if she'd have anything to do with that. Her hair had given up holding any sort of style and returned to its ground-state fluffiness, and she didn't particularly feel like doing anything else with it.

Teatime did bother to knock before he entered, but only perfunctorily, as though knocking were something that had been taught to him whose purpose he utterly failed to grasp. Susan automatically reached out to slap him, but he caught her hand in mid-swing.

"Most people usually say 'hello', you know," he said, catching her other hand as it too attempted to strike. "If I let you go, will you try and hit me again?"

"That depends," Susan said, through clenched teeth, wondering how such a matchstick of a man could be so strong. "Will you still be here?"

Teatime laughed. "Such rapier wit...actually, Susan, I was wondering if I might persuade you to join me for dinner."

She looked at him suspiciously, her mind automatically searching for the trap. She struggled hard to remember what she and Vetinari had talked about earlier--they had agreed that it would be best for her to play along with Teatime, at least up to a point, until they could in some way cement certain points of their budding plot. "What's the catch?" she asked suspiciously.

"No catch," Teatime said merrily. "I just figured that since you were to be my queen, we might...get to know one another. Talk. I've heard it's what couples do."

Susan shut her eyes and counted slowly to ten. "I don't see why not," she said levelly, hoping to God it never occurred to him to wonder just what _else _couples were supposed to do--should his mind ever stray in that direction, she would be liable to forget all Vetinari's warnings and break every bone in Teatime's body.

He released her hands, clapping his own together. "Wonderful," he said. "If you'll just follow me, Illya has made us something special..." He cast a glance over her schoolteaching outfit, realizing dimly that it wasn't the sort of thing prospective queens were supposed to wear, but some dim instinct of self-preservation made him forebear to comment (at least for now).

Realizing there was nothing for it, Susan followed him, the heels of her black boots clicking aggressively over the flagstones. He wasn't really much taller than she, but she knew from experience that he was almost freakishly strong, and she'd be a fool to try to overpower him without help.

He led her into a chamber of such magnificence that she felt sure he must have kidnapped an interior decorator. Susan had grown up in a palace, but this room was much more palatial than anything she'd yet experienced--it looked like someone's idea of a room in a fairy-tale castle, completed with a chandelier to rival that in the opera house at Ankh-Morpork. She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, and raised the other one when Teatime pulled out her chair for her--someone had been giving the little twerp lessons, or she'd eat her socks.

Not that that would be necessary, with such a feast as was spread before her. Illya, whoever he was, had to be one of the most fanatically anal-retentive cooks in the world, by the look of things--never had she seen so many different pastries, not to mention three kinds of soup, two meat dishes, several pies, and a plum pudding the size of a small island. It was a ridiculous amount of food for two people, but that was hardly anything new--back home, when she'd been a child, they'd had enough cooks to feed an army.

"What do you think?" Teatime asked, taking the seat opposite her. Fortunately the table was a large one, which meant that at least she didn't have to try and eat in close proximity to him.

"It's...impressive," Susan said, quite honestly. Suspicion was beginning to niggle at her brain again--what on Disc would motivate him to do something like this? She sat on it, hard--if she could set him at his ease, she'd have a much easier time moving around the castle without being spied upon all the time.

"I was hoping you'd say that." He waved a hand, and Illya himself came forward to serve them--this little feast was his masterpiece, and he'd be damned if he'd let any underling muck up the courses. He wouldn't stay long--Susan had been right in her thought that this was much too much food for two people, though if she had realized the implications of that thought she probably would have let out a most un-Susan-like shriek of laughter.

For Illya was the castle's only cook, which meant that he was responsible for every meal eaten by upwards of five hundred people (the zombie army didn't count). Since he was always pressed for time, he didn't waste any in preparing a special meal for Teatime and a regular meal for everyone else. This, of course, meant that the whole castle would be tonight dining on delicacies from _The Joye of Snackes_--the footmen, the seamstresses, the various flunkies, Vetinari--and if Illya had been a smarter vampire he'd have realized what a recipe for disaster that was. Being a vampire, he'd probably have gone ahead with it anyway, but that wasn't the point.

The point was, things were about to get most...interesting.

Darkness had finally fully settled on the camp outside the castle, and things were more or less calm. To be sure, Ridcully's crossbow had 'accidentally' discharged several times in Albert's general direction, and Agnes tripped whenever she caught sight of the Oh God of Hangovers, but aside from these and other minor interruptions it was more or less peaceful. They had even received a surprise dinner, courtesy of Death himself, who, as he said, 'NEEDED TO TEST OUT A FEW RECIPES'. Unfortunately Nanny Ogg, who had been liberally applying herself to her bottle of home-made brandy for the last half hour, was far too drunk to work out the implications of this, and so it was that the entire encampment that night dined on Famous Carrot and Oyster Pie, among other things.

As Vimes had said earlier, no, this was indeed, most very definitely, _not _going to end well.


	6. Extra Tasty Crispy

Perpetrator's Note: Again, apologies for the slowness of the update—Real Life has this nasty habit of intruding on my writing time. I must say, this story is getting even weirder and more improbable than even I had intended, but what the hell, I'm having fun with it.

——

To Susan's considerable amazement, Teatime actually had more than passable table manners. He knew which fork to use when, he did not slurp his soup, and though he looked incredibly tempted to steal the cream off the top of the eclairs, he somehow restrained himself. Mercifully he did not try over-hard to engage her in conversation, being too absorbed in consuming all the various delicacies his vampiric chef had created.

Susan could see why he was too distracted to talk—wherever he'd found his chef, the man was a genius, particularly with pastries and puddings. They managed to get through the meat, soup, and salad and onto the pudding with barely a word, before Susan gradually began to twig to the fact that something was going vaguely wrong.

Small beads of sweat had broken out on Teatime's forehead, and his face was turning a rather interesting shade of crimson. He downed several hasty swallows from his water glass, clearly struggling valiantly to keep going as usual, a struggle he eventually lost by up-ending the glass over his head. Though it was filled with ice-cubes, it hissed and steamed as soon as it touched his skin, and Susan paused with her fork halfway to her mouth, eying him suspiciously.

"...Are you alright?" she asked, trying to ignore the inner dancing demon that was shrieking 'poison! hooray!'.

Teatime swallowed again, tugging at the high collar of his dress shirt. "...Of course," he said, pouring himself another glass of water. No sooner had he put his hand on the pitcher than its contents came to a slow rolling boil, and both his real and artificial eyes bugged out slightly.

Now, Teatime, though mad as a hatter, was far from stupid. He had made an extensive study of poisons during his time at the Assassin's Guild, and he didn't know of _any_ poison that could make a man feel like...this. _This_ was an entirely alien experience, and while it wasn't exactly unpleasant it was certainly...overpowering, to the point of driving him half distracted. He shifted uncomfortably in his cushy armchair, reaching for a decanter of wine—

—which also boiled at his touch, but then went the additional mile of catching fire. He yelped and dropped it, cast a bewildered, agonized look at Susan, decided better of it, and hotfooted it from the room as fast as his (slightly smoking) shoes would carry him. After a moment there came a distant splash and sizzle, followed by an audible sigh of relief, as he had clearly plunged into the ornamental pond in the menagerie.

Susan blinked, watching the door for a long minute in case he decided to come back, and then shrugged and daintily finished the rest of her pudding. She wasn't sure what all _that_ was about, but she'd be damned if she'd let a meal like this go to waste.

Something very large and apparently very fragile crashed to the ground in the main hall, making Susan jump and drop her fork. The crash was immediately followed by a decidedly female shriek, and then several pairs of running feet.

"Oh, what _now?"_ Susan wondered aloud. She cast around the room for some kind of weapon, settled on the heavy brass fireplace poker, and easing the door open she stuck her head out into the hallway.

What met her eyes was chaos, pure and simple. She hadn't realized how many people were in this castle until she saw half of them tearing about like decapitated chickens, most, she noticed, with smoke trailing from their shoes. Teatime apparently wasn't the only one to have taken a dip in the carp pond, either; guards, seamstresses, and even the stodgy old butler were all dripping and steaming, and still they moved in an odd, jerking dance, as though their knickers were filled with insects.

Susan blinked again, lowering the poker and stepping fully out of the door. A seamstress—and yes, Susan would bet money that she was _that_ kind of seamstress—went tearing past her, ripping at the complicated fastenings of her sodden dress and paying not the least attention to where she was going, until she reached the head of the main staircase and went careening over it, crashing into several maids, the butler, and a groom on the way down. They all wound up at the foot of the staircase in a tangled, groaning heap, and Susan stared, wondering if everyone but she had gone off their nut.

"It would appear that sanity has taken a brief holiday."

Susan jumped, automatically raising the poker as she turned, but it was only Vetinari, who (quite thankfully) looked as sane as she felt. "I don't suppose you would have any idea what is behind this?" he asked, folding his arms.

She shook her head. "Not unless it was something they ate," she said, ducking as a glass flew over her head and smashed on the far wall. "I guess we couldn't make use of this mess and escape, could we?"

Vetinari shook his head. "Unfortunately, the zombies are still at their assigned posts, so I fear escape would be ill-advised." He glanced over the railing and down into the main hall, where everyone seemed to be fighting for places within the ornamental pond, which was steaming like a hot spring on a cold day. He shook his head grimly and turned back to Susan.

"I don't suppose you'd care for a game of chess, until everyone regains their sanity?" he said.

She looked around at the mayhem, absently sticking out the poker and tripping Teatime as he ran past. "I don't see why not," she said, shaking her head. "At this rate they'll have torn the castle down by midnight."

Vetinari offered her a small smirk and his arm, which she took, still retaining hold of the poker in her free hand. Together they proceeded through the mayhem, intermittently ducking as something (or someone) went sailing past. Occasionally Susan would have to make use of her poker, or Vetinari of his walking stick, but they eventually made it back to Vetinari's rooms, where they shut and securely bolted the door.

Now, Vetinari was no fool. He had a feeling that he knew quite well what the source of this seeming madness was—it had, after all, been printed in his own city, and he had for years kept tabs on virtually everything the Engraver's Guild turned out. He therefore knew that the effects would only be temporary, but it would probably be best to be well out of the way until they wore off. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised that it wasn't affecting Susan—she was, barring himself, the most self-possessed person he had ever met, and people like that tended to overpower outside influences without even thinking about it.

"I'd say we have about two hours before that wears off," he said, carefully arranging the chessboard. "Do have a seat."

Susan sat, and, to a background soundtrack of shrieks and the tinkle of breaking glass, they played chess and discussed possible methods of escape, dismissing this or that one as the pieces slowly fell.

"I believe we may have a rescue squad," Vetinari said, and Susan frowned as he took her knight. "I could not say just who they are, but there seem to be quite a few of them out there." He jerked his head at the window, through which Susan could see a multitude of campfires winking in the distance. "I am, however, willing to lay money that at least one of them is Commander Vimes."

"He'd come all the way out here?" Susan asked, felling two pawns in one swoop.

"Oh, yes. To him it's a straightforward case of theft, and, to quote him, 'once a copper, always a copper'. He won't treat it like a kidnapping; to him it's simply a matter of retrieving stolen goods." One of her bishops fell to his rook, and she scowled, sending several pawns after it.

"Is he any good at retrieving stolen goods?"

Vetinari considered this. "Vimes usually finds a way," he said. "It might involve several explosions and annoying all who encounter him past the point of sanity, but he finds a way." He paused thoughtfully, and would have said more, save that at that moment someone knocked smartly on the door.

———

Death hummed to himself as he spread butter over a frying pan. The first course of his culinary experiment had been a great success, even with Albert, who normally avoided anything that wasn't fried in six layers of grease. They were all just finishing up now, except for Nanny Ogg, who was unconscious and snoring like thunder. The pudding was cooking nicely, as was the sauce, and all around him people were talking and eating and enjoying themselves.

It would be useless to ask where Death had gotten all the ingredients for his dishes—he was Death; if he wanted it, he got it, with the minimum amount of fuss. He was just pouring batter into the skillet when there came a tremendous crash from the direction of the castle, which made everyone jump and which caused him to drop pan and batter into the fire.

DAMN, he muttered. SO MUCH FOR THE BLINTZES.

"What in hell was that?" Ridcully demanded, pausing in the act of licking his plate.

"Dunno, but it sounded big." Nobby set aside his pad of paper and took a small, filthy telescope, of the sort usually used by sailors, from a pocket. He put it to one eye, adjusted it this way and that, finally remembered to take off the lens cover, and pointed it in the direction of the Great Hall.

"It...looks like they're all going swimming," he said uncertainly, squinting into the tube.

"What?" Vimes demanded.

"They're...in some kind of indoor pond...and it's steaming."

"_Steaming?_"

"Uh-huh...oh, a seamstress just went bowling down the main staircase—"

"Give that here." Vimes snatched the telescope from Nobby's hands, tried (and failed) to clean it on the tail of his shirt, and took a look for himself. "...They've all gone mad," he said. He handed the spyglass back to Nobby and tugged on his collar—was it just him, or was it getting warmer?

There came another tinkling crash, and several shrieks. Agnes winced.

"They're killing each other in there!" she said, shocked.

Vimes cast a glance at her. "No, I rather don't think they are."

"Are you sure? Let me see."

Vimes took the telescope from Nobby before Agnes could grab it. "I _really _don't think that would be a good idea," he said hastily. "It's...not a sight for a lady's eyes."

"Its'—" Agnes stopped, comprehending, and gawped at him. "...Oh," she said in a small voice. "Oh _dear_."

"Indeed." He handed the glass back to Nobby and shook his head, again tugging at his collar. "I think—wait..."

The great front doors opened, spilling something—or someone—out into the night. Whoever it was shut the door conscientiously behind him, and hurried off across the fields at a brisk trot. As the figure drew nearer it revealed itself to be—

"_Carrot?_" Vimes said weakly, staring. "What in hell are you doing here? And how did you _get_ here so fast?"

Carrot saluted smartly. As usual, his breastplate and helmet gleamed, and though he'd been running he wasn't even sweating.

"Sorry to bother you, sir. I've just gotten the wages chitty signed, sir, and I must say, it's a jolly good siege you've got going here."

Everybody stared at him. Vimes felt his jaw drop.

"You..._what?_" he demanded, certain, even after all his experience with Carrot, that he hadn't heard correctly.

"The wages chitty."

Vimes stared at him. "Wait...wait...you came out here all the way from bloody _Ankh-Morpork_, you came _five hundred bloody miles in one day_, you broke into the castle, you found the Patrician, and all you did was _get the wages chitty signed?_"

Carrot nodded, and Angua covered her face with her hands. "That's right, sir. And I brought you some reinforcements—they should be here any minute."

There are some situations in which hand meeting forehead is the only proper response, and Vimes did so now. He should have, after all his experience with Carrot, known better than to be surprised by anything the man did, but...but...

But if it had been _him_, he'd have done it on purpose, broken into enemy territory just to prove that he could—he'd have been an obnoxious little swat, to tell the truth, doing his best to show up the officers...but in Carrot's eyes there was nothing more or less than innocent, guileless earnestness, and he was forced to admit that, really, Carrot actually meant what he said.

"I need a drink," he groaned. "Wait, wait, even...how did you even _get_ here? Ankh-Morpork's five hundred miles away, it should have taken you _days_..."  
"Oh, I had some help, sir—the reinforcements, like I told you. Look, here they come."

Through his haze of disbelief Vimes managed to register that Carrot was looking skyward, and so perforce did he, squinting into the starry darkness. Something big, something much too big (and too loud) to be a bird was approaching, something mammoth and wooden and creaking with a pair of blades whirring above it. The wind the thing produced as it approached nearly knocked Vimes off his feet, scattering the embers of their campfires, and once it landed it emitted, much like a clown car, Sergeant Detritus, Corporal Littlebottom, Reg Shoe, Buggy Swires, and a host of others Vimes didn't recognize—some appeared to be wizards, some appeared to be palace guards, and at least one appeared to be Foul Ole Ron. They were all followed by a somewhat frail-looking man of indeterminate age, with long greying hair and beard, wearing a faded red robe spotted with acid-burns and an expression of near terminal good-natured distractedness.

"Captain...who _are _these people?" Vimes asked, as they marched (or tripped, or swore) their way across the grassy hummocks.

"Well, sir, when I went up to the palace to see about the wages chitty, I ran into this nice gentleman here—" he pointed at the greying geezer "—who told me he might be able to help rescue the Patrician. So we got together a few recruits, and...here we are."

Vimes stared at the man. There was something vaguely familiar about him, though for the life of him Vimes couldn't figure out—

"Oh, gods," he groaned. "_Leonard of Quirm?_ But...but he's been missing for ages! I thought he was dead."

The elderly chap blinked at him. "Dead? Oh, good heavens, no. I've just been...away from the world, for a bit, you know how it is. Working." He rubbed his thin hands together and regarded the castle. "And I really think I might be able to do something about that."

"Well, it's more than any of use can say so far," Vimes snorted, and swallowed hard. He really was feeling unaccountably warm, for such a cool night—sweat had broken out on his temples, and his clothing was feeling inexplicably tight...

Carrot looked at him. "Are you all right, sir? Your face is a little...red..."

Vimes shook himself. "Of course...er...I think I'll just...go for a walk..." And without waiting for a response he was off into the woods as fast as his feet could carry him, hoping desperately that there was some sort of stream or pond or even puddle nearby.

A short while later found him in what was little more than a mud-puddle with pretensions, its murky waters steaming gently, a look of complete bliss on his face. It would have been quite a lot better if he hadn't been followed by, in order, Colon, Ridcully, Albert, and a very cross-looking Agnes, who sat in a corner all her own and silently dared anyone to comment. Several far-off shrieks and once brief, brilliant gout of flame hinted that others were faring no better than they, and Vimes wondered idly what the hell was going on. Angua had been spotted earlier, hurrying past dragging Carrot by the collar, but at least she'd had the decency to get out of earshot before...doing whatever she was going to do.

"Well," he muttered, as Bilious, his sandals smoking, went hurtling past, "this just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?"

——

Death was intensely puzzled. Granted, his meal had been interrupted halfway through the penultimate course, but even in its incomplete state he did not think it was supposed to make people react like this. Nearly the entire camp had gone streaking off in various directions (in Nanny Ogg's case, quite literally streaking—even were he able to forget like a mortal, THAT was an image that would have been forever seared into the very bedrock of his hindbrain), leaving only himself, Life, and the Bursar, the latter two of whom appeared to be occupied in chasing imaginary butterflies.

_STRANGE,_ he mused. _BUT THEN, PERHAPS THIS IS ALL A PART OF IT. _Death had as much understanding of romance as a chicken has of nuclear physics, but he was pretty certain this wasn't how it went. And speaking of chickens—

"Know I get into how castle to," said the Bursar, abruptly abandoning the chimerical papilios and collapsing beside the fire like a marionette with cut strings.

Death peered at him, trying to line the words up into something resembling coherence, but before he could do so Life had plopped down on the other side of the fire, happily chewing on a speckled red mushroom. "How?" she asked, her pop-eyes round and faintly bloodshot.

"Chickens," the Bursar said promptly, beaming proudly. "Fire to set them, catapult then wall them over."

Silence.

WAIT, said Death, somewhat adrift on the dragon-filled expanse of the Bursar's mental sea, YOU WANT TO SET FIRE TO CHICKENS, AND HURL THEM OVER THE CASTLE WALLS?

"It's an ancient Agatean trick," the Bursar said, managing a cohesive sentence by pure accident.

_IT WOULD TAKE A MADMAN TO THINK FLAMING POULTRY AS A WEAPON WAS A GOOD IDEA_, Death thought, shaking his head.

"It's ruddy brilliant," said Life, grinning.

Death smacked his forehead, making his skull echo.

——

Some time later most of the camp had wandered back to the fires, dripping and still occasionally throwing sparks. Vimes called them all together, bound and determined to accomplish at least something of vague importance. This wasn't likely, considering how many people had imbibed Nanny's 'special green herbal drink' during dinner, and those that were still upright were staring rather vacantly at things only they could see. Even the personifications were having a rough go of it—Nanny's liquor could intoxicate a statue at fifty paces, and the fumes alone were enough to make most normal people tipsy.

Of the witches, only Granny Weatherwax was even conscious, but she was sitting ramrod-straight on a log by their fire, glaring at everyone as though daring them to comment. Agnes and Magrat were snoring in a genteel sort of way, and Nanny, even through her sleep, was mumbling bits of the Hedgehog song. Nobby would probably have been somewhere near her, save that he was out stone cold and pinned firmly under Vimes's boot. Carrot and Angua sat beside him, both looking distinctly rumpled (and quite sheepish), not meeting anyone's eyes save each other's.

A fire over, Famine was sitting and giggling drunkenly, Pestilence was rocking and looking distinctly green, and War, to whom the word 'drunk' was a mystery, was still happily quaffing what everyone devoutly hoped was ale. Mrs. War was fussing at him, but in a perfunctory sort of way, as if this was what was expected of her and she was damn well going to do it. Destiny was sound asleep, and Fate, oblivious to the attentions being foisted on her by Bilious (whose robe was still smoking faintly) was swaying and drooling slightly. Lobsang was stumbling about, launched on a drunken tirade that was much too slurred for anyone to understand, occasionally tripping and continuing his monologue from the ground.

Vimes sighed. Of all the motley horde, perhaps five people were paying him any attention at all—Leonard of Quirm, Death, Detritus, and Cheery. Foul Ole Ron (_why_ had they brought him along?) rarely paid attention to anything, drunk or sober, so that wasn't much loss, but he was going to be hard put to do anything with the rest of this lot. Really, it was almost enough to make him fall off the wagon himself, it was so depressing. How were they supposed to do anything against that castle, when they couldn't even collectively pay attention for more than two minutes?

"I say," said the Dean, who had come with Leonard in his flying-contraption, "this herbal drink is rather good...pour me another mug, Bursar, there's a good man."

"Whoops, Mr. Jelly," the Bursar said happily, obliging. He stepped over the prone Ponder Stibbons, in whose alcohol-ridden head visions of quantum thingummies danced like sugar plum fairies.

Life giggled at that, absently patting Rincewind on the head. By some miracle the wizard was only mildly intoxicated, and even through his fuzzy haze he recognized that the safest place to be was wherever she was, proceeding on the dim logic that it was pretty hard to die while sitting next to the personification of Life. He grinned at her and offered her another mushroom, which she speared on the end of someone's sword and proceeded to attempt to roast. Of course it promptly burst into flames, which sent both of them into gales of laughter.

Death scowled at them, insomuch as a skull _can_ scowl. His grip tightened on his scythe.

ALBERT, WHAT DO YOU CALL IT WHEN THE ATTENTION ONE PERSON PAYS ANOTHER MAKES YOU WANT TO BEAT THAT PERSON TO A BLOODY PULP?

"Jealousy, master." Albert was hunched over, smoking a foul role-up and doing his best to ignore the rest of the camp. Needless to say, it was a losing battle.

IT'S NOT PLEASANT, IS IT?

"Generally not, master."

WELL, WHAT DOES ONE DO ABOUT IT?

"I usually beat them to a bloody pulp, master."

Death considered this a moment. RIGHT, he said, taking out Rincewind's lifetimer. Because it looked like something made by an insane glassblower with a bad case of the hiccups, he hadn't the faintest idea when the man was due to die, but given the circumstances he felt he could probably just wait for an opportune moment to...make an educated guess. He scowled at Rincewind, who, intercepting the scowl, went pale and hid behind a log.

Vimes, his nerves at last stretched to the breaking point, gave up trying to politely gather everyone's attention. He cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed, his voice echoing through all the little valleys that surrounded them.

"IF EVERYBODY DOESN'T SHUT UP _RIGHT NOW_, I WILL PERSONALLY EAT ALL YOUR LIVERS!"

Silence.

"Well, buggrit," said Foul Ole Ron at last. "Could've just _asked_."

"Yeah," said the Dean. "No need to get _violent_, man."

A vein throbbed in Vimes's forehead, suggesting just how violent he'd like to be at that moment, and even the Dean, who was as perceptive as half a brick, was wise enough to subside. "Look," he said, in a voice of deadly patience, "as much...fun...as this has all been, if we don't come up with a plan of attack, we're never going to see the inside of that castle, and everyone we came to rescue are going to stay stuck in there until Doomsday. I don't know just what we're up against, but whoever they are, they seem to be a sight better organized than we are, and if we don't do something about it, they're going to eat us for lunch."

"Is it just me, or does he have rather a fixation with cannibalism?" hissed the Chair of Indefinite Studies, in a stage whisper that could have carried half a mile.

Vimes took a deep breath, valiantly attempting to ignore this. "Now," he said, "does anyone have any ideas? Anyone at all?"

Life, now on the upswing of her mushroom-induced psychosis, dreamily raised a hand.

"Yes?" Vimes said warily, knowing that nothing good could come from this.

"Chickens," she said promptly. "Light them on fire, an' hurl 'em over the castle walls."

Vimes stared at her. "Chickens," he echoed, realizing he should have known it would be something like this. "And what, exactly, do you suggest we hurl them _with?_"

Leonard looked up from his sketching. "Actually, I designed a device some time ago that just might do the trick," he said excitedly. "It's a high-powered catapult capable of launching objects up to seventy miles."

"What a waste of a good dinner!" the Dean said hotly, but nobody heard him in the general babble that broke out.

"You know, that could work..."

"But what about trajectories?"

"Oh, you just allow for wind variance, air pressure, that sort of thing...with the right calculations, you could get a chicken through even a small opening."

"But wouldn't the flames make air resistance?"

"Good point...I'll have to work it out."

Vimes stared. His eyes actually bulged out of his head. "I don't believe this," he said. "You're all actually considering this, aren't you? You're actually going to light a bunch of chickens on fire and throw them at the castle like...like _weapons_, and you expect it will do any good? Where," he asked, his voice going slightly shrill with incipient hysteria, "are you going to get the chickens?"

"Gytha's got some," said Granny. "There's plenty about in Lancre." She did not actually think the chickens would accomplish a damn thing, but they _would_ provide a welcome distraction, in which something real could be attempted without fear of observation.

Vimes threw up his hands. "I give up," he said. "I give up! You're all bound and determined to do this like pillocks, so _have. Bloody. Fun. I QUIT!_" He stomped off through the grass, stopping only long enough to grab a half-full bottle from the surprised Dean, who made a face at his retreating back.

Silence fell again, for a very long moment.

"Unbalanced, that man," Ridcully said at last. "So what about this chicken-flinging machine?"

——

Heehee! The madness continues. Next chapter will see all-out war launched, with help from Cupid, the Nac mac Feegle, and several members of the Silver Horde. Vimes gets utterly trashed, Teatime again attempts to be romantic, Susan and Vetinari scheme, and quite a lot of people take out frustrated jealousy in...interesting...ways. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.


	7. To Hell in a Handbasket

A/N: I give you, at long, long last, the next installment of this little mess. I fear that the further I go, the more OOC the characters get, but since it's all in the name of my own amusement, I don't overly care. -grin-

Also, since this chapter quickly bloated beyond all control (as I fear the others will, thanks to the massive cast of characters I so foolishly chose to work with), I split it in two--it's only going to get more complicated as more and more people descend on the scene, so it's my way of making my life just a little bit easier.

----

Vimes stalked through the woods, taking irregular pulls off his bottle, ignoring the foliage that seemed hell-bent on slapping him in the face. He knew, deep in the recesses of his conscience, that he shouldn't have fallen off the wagon so easily--he'd faced much worse than this before without cracking. Hell, he'd gone back in time and managed all right, had outwitted Carcer and managed to organize a formerly chaotic revolution, but this...this was just _irritating_. Vimes was used to dealing with idiots, but not on this grand a scale, and certainly not idiots with as much power as half this lot seemed to possess.

He sighed, collapsing onto a stump and wiping his forehead. He missed Sybil and Young Sam, and when it came to getting the Patrician back, he still didn't have a bloody clue. Left to their own devices, the mob in the meadow was likely to be camped there for years, while back home the city went to wrack and ruin and people like Rust weaseled their way into power. Really, it was enough to make him want to give up then and there.

Something rustled in the bushes to his left, and even with the alcohol that was rapidly gaining hold of his bloodstream he froze. His head snapped around, searching for the source of the noise--it wasn't an animal sound; it was quiet, but immensely widespread, as though quite a lot of very small things were barreling through the undergrowth.

Something shot out of the holly and landed on his knee, and so great was his surprise that he nearly fell off the stump. It was a little blue man, perhaps six inches high, carrying a pike and sword almost bigger than he was. His red hair was matted into dreadlocks, and his bright, piercing eyes regarded Vimes as though trying to decide if he was worth attacking.

"Ach, what're yelookin' at, bigjob?" the creature demanded, jabbing Vimes in the leg. "T'ere's badness aboot, laddie...gi'it such a kickin'!"

Vimes blinked. Surely he hadn't drunk enough to be seeing this thing--normally it took him at least a quart of Old Overcoat before the pink elephants came out of the walls. This thing wasn't pink, and it certainly wasn't an elephant, so Vimes' mind reluctantly decided it must be real.

"...Right," Vimes said, hopelessly bemused. He'd caught perhaps one word in three, but the creature's general meaning was clear enough. "They're over that way." He pointed back the way he had come, and the little man saluted and leapt off his knee.

"Nac mac Feegle!" it cried, and disappeared faster than Vimes could blink.

"Why do I get the feeling this isn't going to help?" he muttered, watching the ferns and shrubs ripple as the unseen army passed through.

_Probably because it's not_, his conscience said, and then shut down entirely as he keeled backward, lost in a world of fumes and happy brain-death.

----

It was Granny who heard the Nac mac Feegle first. She was sitting a little ways away from the camp, doing her level best to rid her mind of the arrow's unwanted influence. It was working, too--as Nanny often said, nothing and no one on the Disc had as much self-control as Granny Weatherwax; she'd bested vampires, elves, and unicorns, and a cupid's arrow didn't stand a chance.

Her hand shot out as the first Feegle came sailing over a log, snatching him out of the air. She held him up and regarded him closely.

"Ah," she said, as he squirmed in her grasp. "I thought you little devils'd be along sooner or later.

"T'ere can only be one t'ousand!" the little man cried, waving his toadsticker in a surprisingly menacing fashion.

"I think there's a sight more of you than that," said Granny, and she actually sounded amused. "Try not to do too much damage, will you?"

"Ain't promisin' nuffin!"

"I didn't think you would."

She set him down again and watched as he scampered off. All over the meadow the grass rustled with the passage of the Feegle, as they made their way purposefully toward the winking campfires. And, all alone in the darkness, she smiled to herself.

There was a reason Granny Weatherwax seldom smiled in public. True, she seldom smiled, _period_, but for years she had avoided doing it in public because of the reaction it caused. Apparently, the rest of the world saw something terribly incongruous about a Granny Weatherwax with a happy little grin on her face, and she supposed she couldn't blame them, really. She only ever wore such an expression when she was contemplating doing something extraordinarily nasty to someone else.

She stood up, adjusting her hat, her mouth set in a resolute line. The effects of the Cupid's arrow were far from gone, but at least they were manageable now, and her head was clear enough that she knew exactly what she had to do.

She had to...help.

The trees rustled as Granny marched off into the woods, and the few animals that were about at this hour fled in terror before her. They'd seen Granny angry--it was as much her normal state as any--and they'd seen her so deeply contemplative that she was scarcely aware of where she set her feet, but they'd never seen her _humming._

It was, as they were all too well aware, a very, _very_ bad sign.

----

Quiet had finally descended on the castle, as everyone either passed out from sheer exhaustion or found convenient cubbyholes to hide in, and Susan was, for once in her life, bored.

_I knew I needed a vacation, but this wasn't what I had in mind_, she thought, staring out the window with her chin on her hand. She and Vetinari had spent the preceding hours of culinary-induced chaos playing chess, but though things seemed to have calmed, she wasn't sure she wanted to risk wandering the rest of the castle yet. She was in a foul enough mood that she just might wallop anybody she ran across with the poker, and if she was to maintain even a shred of her cover image, that wouldn't do at all.

"Anything interesting out there?" Vetinari asked, offering her a glass of wine.

She shrugged. "Just the siege," she said. "It's too dark to make out what they're doing, but it looks like they're building something."

"We would be that unfortunate," Vetinari said dryly. "If I'm not mistaken, Captain Carrot came here in a conveyance built by a...permanent guest of mine. He's something of a genius in the weapons-of-mass-destruction area."

Susan, who still couldn't believe that Carrot had made it into the castle and _hadn't_ tried to rescue anybody, shook her head. "Leonard of Quirm?" she asked. "Oh, yes, he's out there. So is my grandfather, and Albert, and Lobsang, and the astonishingly open-minded Mrs. Ogg...really, I'd feel better if I _didn't_ know just who was meant to be saving us."

Vetinari looked at her curiously. "How do you know all that?" he asked.

"Family trait," she said, somewhat bitterly. "Believe me, it's more trouble than it's worth."

He sat down in the armchair opposite her, setting down his drink and folding his hands in his trademark I'm-listening-so-hard-I-can-hear-your-thoughts fashion. "I wasn't aware magical ability ran in your family," he said, arching his eyebrows. Vetinari had known for years that there was some mystery attached to the family of Sto Helit, but even his normally infallible detectives had failed to find out just what exactly it was.

Susan snorted, rubbing her temples. "You don't want to know," she said. "Trust me--just about everyone who's ever found out about it has run away screaming in terror. Not that I blame them," she added. "If I wasn't me, I'd do the same thing."

"Indulge an old man's curiosity," Vetinari said.

She looked at him, and sighed. "All right," she said. "You've ruled Ankh-Morpork for the last twenty years, I guess you can understand, if anybody can." She paused, searching for some way of phrasing her next words that wouldn't either make her look barking mad, or give Vetinari a heart attack. "You know that...Death is a person, right? Not death but Death, with a capital D. Grim Reaper, scythe, cowl, pale horse, the whole bit?"

Vetinari nodded.

"There's really no good way to say this. He's my grandfather."

Vetinari regarded her in silence for some moments, and Susan groaned inwardly. It was always the same--they looked at you as though you were mad, and made all kinds of delicate suggestions, usually involving sanitariums overlooking the sea, and no matter how hard you tried, you couldn't make them _understand_. She supposed it was something you had to be born to, in which case the whole world was at a disadvantage.

At long last Vetinari opened his mouth, but what emerged therefrom was not at all what Susan, after long years of experience, had expected.

"That...explains rather a lot, actually."

She stared at him. "_What?_" she demanded.

"It explains rather a lot. Certain things about your family have puzzled me for years, but an ancestor of the anthropomorphic persuasion would explain virtually all of them. I have never known anyone, outside of witches and wizards, capable of manipulating Time the way your family can--among other things, it gave me quite a lot to wonder about.

"I can see, however, why you wouldn't wish to make it public knowledge--I would imagine it would make you rather unpopular at parties, for example." He sat back, apparently considering, and Susan stared at him.

_Gods, he really _isn't _surprised by anything, is he?_ she thought.

"We may be able to use that," he said after a moment. "I do not know how, just yet, but I assume you have other powers as well?"

Susan blinked, desperately trying to kick her train of thought onto an unexpected rail. "Well, yes, normally, but something seems to have been done to this place--I can't walk through walls, I can't fade, and even my hair seems to have given up." She glanced upward at the fuzzy mass, which stood around her head like an extremely frizzy corona.

Vetinari steepled his fingers, thinking. "Have you tested _all _of them?" he asked.

"Well...no, actually."

He smiled, the sort of smile that is usually only seen shooting up through the ocean toward a surfer. "Let us...experiment, then, shall we?"

----

Night passed. It didn't want to linger.

The first thing Sam Vimes was aware of, when he was conscious enough to be aware of anything, was that his mouth tasted like a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair. The second was a splitting headache, followed by the hot, gluey-eyeball feeling requisite of any decent hangover, and finally that he was lying on something cold, hard, and above all, wet.

He opened his sticky eyes, and immediately wished he hadn't. It was early morning, but the sky was already far too bright and blue, and seemed to sear itself onto the back of his skull. He couldn't remember much of what had gone on last night, not after he'd seen the little blue people--he'd taken it as a sign that he wasn't nearly drunk enough, and had remedied this problem so effectively that now he feared he'd never be sober again.

"Wzthgf," he mumbled. He debated the merits of turning over, decided against it, and shut his eyes again, hoping fervently that when next he opened them, he'd be in his own bed and all this would just be one horrible, indigestion-induced nightmare.

"WAAAAAAAARK!"

The sound was like nothing Vimes had ever heard in his life. It was worse than a cat in heat; it was worse even than Nobby when he practiced for his folk song-and-dance festivals. It was the sound of a creature that just knows, bad as things are, they're about to get one hell of a lot worse.

His eyes snapped open again, just in time to see a whirring ball of flame and feathers go sailing over his head. It met the curtain-wall with a sound almost exactly like that of a thick balloon filled with custard, whereupon it slid slowly down and set the grass afire.

"Oh, _gods_," he groaned. One hand moved of its own accord and started rubbing his face, probably in the vain hope of injecting some life into his dew-damp skin. "They're doing it. They're really bloody doing it."

"WAAAAAAAAARK!"

He squinted as another chicken went sailing over his head, and even his alcohol-addled brain realized there was something wrong with the picture. It sounded like a chicken--albeit an extremely tortured one--and it (kind of) looked like a chicken, but only kind of.

_I don't want to know_, he thought, shutting his eyes again. _But I'm probably going to find out._

Slowly, and rather painfully, Vimes sat up. He'd lost his helmet overnight, and whatever had gone to the toilet in his mouth had apparently also done so in his ear. He squinted blearily at the line of what, for want of a better term, had to be called besiegers, and wondered if what he was seeing could possibly be real.

Somehow, overnight, they had built one of the most bizarre contraptions he had ever seen. It was a little like a catapult, and a little like a cannon, but mostly like something dreamed up by a stoned mathematician in the armpit of a really bad night. It had a row of seven large, cannon-like apertures, four of which were still smoking faintly, and a bewildering assortment of levers, ropes, pulleys, winches, and buttons whose function Vimes didn't even want to try to guess. Given that the wizards had almost certainly been involved in its construction, he _really _didn't want to guess.

Even as he watched, the fifth tube exploded in a flash of gunpowder and octarine, and another chicken-like thing went sailing through the air. Now that he got a better look at it, he could see that it wasn't really a chicken at all--it looked like a feathery cannon-ball, with feet.

"**WAAAAAAAAAARK!"**

_BOOM_

"Oh, I say, good shot, Mister Stibbons!"

Ridcully, his crossbow balanced in one hand, was shading his eyes as he stared at the mushroom-cloud of smoke that was swiftly rising over the castle. Ponder, beside him, had a face as green as the grass, but he looked rather proud all the same.

"It's all in the trajectory, sir," he said. "You just have to allow for wind variance, and the air resistance of the flames, and then...well..._boom_."

Vimes gave up. He _knew_ he was going to get up and ask them what the hell was going on, and he _knew _it was going to be something involving quantum, so he did. He stood, extremely unsteadily, and then promptly ducked again as yet another...missile...was launched. The wind of its passage ruffled his hair, and this time he had to stop his ears against the resounding explosion that followed.

"All right," he said, his voice hoarse and gravelly as he crawled toward the contraption. "What, in the name of all seven hells, is _that_ thing?"

Ridcully, one of Nature's most disgustingly cheerful morning people, grinned at him. "Cracking good, isn't it?" he asked. "That Leonard chappie designed it, and the staff and I had it put together in a jiffy. 'Course, proper chickens weren't really the right thing--not nearly enough oomph on impact--but then the inestimable Mistress Weatherwax pointed out that a mixture of sulfur and ammonium nitrate would work much better."

"**WAAAAAAAAAAAAARK!"**

_BOOM_

Vimes winced at the noise. "So...why do they still sound like chickens, then?" he asked, not at all certain he wanted to know.

Life, now wearing Nanny Ogg's best family-feuding hat in addition to her woolly dressing gown, drifted over to them. Someone had evidently tried to brush her hair, for it stood out around her head like dandelion fluff, and every now and again a blue spark would crackle off it. "Oh, but they have to at least _sound _like chickens," she said, her protuberant eyes seeming to bore straight into the back of his skull. "Otherwise what's the _point_?"

Vimes stared. "...You've got me there," he admitted. "So, um, what were you all planning to do once you'd got the wall down, just out of curiosity?"

Ridcully stared at him. "What d'you mean?"

"You know, after the wall's down, and all the maddened zombies behind it rush out at you? Call me Mister Silly, but I don't think they're going to be very pleased with you."

Ridcully blinked. "Stibbons, what exactly _were _we doing to do, once we'd knocked the blasted thing down?"

Ponder paused with his hand mid-way to the next lever. He opened his mouth, but nothing emerged from it for several seconds. "...I thought you had a plan," he said at last.

"Ah. That's what I thought." Vimes shook his head (very carefully, in case it really was going to fall off) and staggered away. He debated finding water or another drink, and decided on the drink.

Ponder and Ridcully watched him go, weaving and staggering. "Ten to one he doesn't make it to the treeline," Ridcully said at last.

"Three to one says he doesn't even make it halfway."

In the end they both lost--Vimes managed a full twelve steps before collapsing again, with a suitably impressive thud.

"You know, we probably should try and keep him sober," piped the Dean, who had waddled over. "He's a bit more experienced at this sort of thing than we are."

"True." Ridcully rubbed his beard thoughtfully. "And I think I know what might work."

------

"**WAAAAAAAAAAAAAARK**!"

As the chicken-like missiles went sailing by, Magrat sat with her fingers in her ears.

"They're not really chickens, you know," Nanny said conversationally. "You don't have to take it so hard." She was currently making toast, while keeping half an eye on the mammoth cauldron boiling over the fire.

Magrat unplugged one ear and winced. "But they _sound_ like chickens," she protested. "That's almost as bad."

Granny stirred the bubbling concoction, leaning back as it belched out a great cloud of vivid magenta steam. "Would've been better if they'd used the real thing," she said, sniffing experimentally, "the reason being, live chickens'd run about more. Set things on fire, style of thing."

Even Agnes grimaced. "Granny, that's _awful_," she said. In her head, Perdita agreed.

_Of course it is. Waste of a good dinner, eh?_

Granny snorted. "No, it's practical. 'Awful' would be if we used them _and_ the explosives."

"But where would you put--oh." Nanny blinked. "You sure that arrow's not still giving you gyp, Esme? That's not your normal line o' thinkin' at all."

Granny glared at her.

"Just you shut up about that arrow," she snapped. "I'm _fine_. Bloody Cupids--cut-rate love potions, that's all they do. Don't last more'n a few hours."

Behind her, Bilious was frantically picking flowers, while Nobby was attempting to compound his own chocolates. At least, Agnes _hoped_ they were chocolates--if not, she certainly wasn't about to shake hands with him.

"...Right," she said. She glanced about the encampment, which was somewhat empty. Most of the wizards were occupied with the chicken-flinging device, Leonard of Quirm was attempting to lecture War on battle strategies, and Commander Vimes was snoring gently in the grass, but a great many people seemed to have wandered off. Carrot, Angua, Albert, and most of the personifications had wandered off, and Agnes devoutly hoped it was to search for firewood. The alternative just didn't bear thinking about, especially in the case of Albert.

Several of the wizards were seated around the next fire over, feverishly cranking out more chicken-bombs. They already had enough to level half a dozen castles, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves, so Agnes couldn't bring herself to say anything to them. Besides, it was keeping them out of other mischief which, knowing the kind of mischief an unoccupied wizard could _get _up to, was probably a good thing.

She got up and wandered through the grass, following the pathways that were already being trodden by the passage of so many feet. Agnes had long ago accepted her role as the practical one, and it was with only mild irritation at Fate that she performed a general diagnostic on the state of the camp.

"No, wait, the fuse doesn't go there, it goes _here_." The Chair of Indefinite Studies was attempting to tamp black powder into one of the poultry-bombs, wedging the fuse in like a straw into a milkshake. The Senior Wrangler somehow managed to choke and duck in one swift, incredibly awkward-sounding movement.

"_Don't--_"

**BOOM**

****"--do that."

The Lecturer in Recent Runes, who hadn't managed to duck in time, reached up and gingerly felt his face. He sighed.

"Well, it's not as though I really _needed_ my eyebrows anyway," he said, to the world in general, and then fell back to work.

Agnes shook her head, stepping absently over Vimes' prone form and approaching the biggest fire in the camp. The Nac mac Feegle, who had invaded much earlier, were crowded around it, all busily constructing a device whose use Agnes wasn't even going to _attempt_ to fathom. Its main theme was spikes, and occasional puffs of steam emitted from odd tubes, and she had a feeling that the only safe place to be was about five miles away from it. They were quarreling noisily in their own garbled language, randomly whacking one another with tools, weapons, or, occasionally, each other.

Beyond them, a gaggle of personifications had gathered around Death's bonfire. Mrs. War was, as usual, fussing, while Famine and Pestilence appeared to be lost in a game of draughts. It was going rather well, considering Famine kept trying to eat the pieces. War's youngest daughter, Clancy, was poking the fire with a stick, and was apparently deriving an unholy amount of enjoyment therefrom. Agnes ambled past just as Death sighed.

LET ME SET THIS STRAIGHT. I AM DEATH. THIS IS MINE. YOU ARE LIFE. YOU GET...FUZZY BUNNIES, OR SOMETHING. THE POINT IS, YOU DO _NOT_ GET TO PLAY WITH THE SCYTHE, ALL RIGHT?

"What about the sword?"

NOT THE SWORD, EITHER.

"Ah, ye're no fun."

Agnes shook her head, stopping when she felt she was close enough to the castle. Perdita, vocal (and obnoxious) as ever, thought the facade was far more pretentious than size and design warranted, but Agnes ignored her. There was something extremely..._off_ about the building, and she squinted at it, measuring angles and corners with her eyes. She couldn't tell just where the wrongness came in, but as a witch she'd learned to trust her extra sensory perceptions, and all of them were screaming at her now.

_Oh, for gods' sake, you useless lump, it's just like the gnarly ground_. Perdita, always tactful, cut through her speculation with all the delicacy of a saber. _It looks like whatever you expect...it _wants _you to think it's impenetrable, so it presents you with your mind's vision of an unbreakable fortress._

Agnes opened her mouth to snap, automatically, and then shut it again. She covered her left eye with her hand, her right watering as it strained to focus. Sure enough, the walls and battlements seemed to shift if she stared hard enough, melding through a confusing amalgamation of images.

She lowered her hand, staring. "I'll be damned," she said aloud, for once shocked into profanity stronger than 'poot'. "You actually said something _useful_."

Perdita preened. _We all have our moments. Hey, wait a minute..._

But Agnes was already off, hurrying back to the witches' fire, for once not caring if she waddled. She'd lost a fair amount of weight, but she'd had a lot of weight to lose, and as Perdita often pointed out, she was going to be a big girl no matter what.

"Granny!" she said, half out of breath. "Granny, look at the castle--really look, and tell me what you see."

Granny, who had taken over stirring the cauldron, gave Agnes a look of thinly veiled amusement. "Seen it too, have you? You're the only one that has, for all the magic and education this lot's got between 'em."  
Still puffing slightly, Agnes sighed inwardly, all her excitement deflating like a balloon. She should have known Granny would have seen it first, but _still_...

"All right, so you already saw it. You do know that it means the...poultry bombs...are useless, right? They're not doing half the damage the wizards think they are."

Granny didn't smile, or even _almost _smile, but there was enough suggestion of possibly almost smiling that Perdita and Agnes shivered together. "Oh, they're not useless," Granny said easily. "Keepin' the wizards distracted, aren't they? No, our young man over there's been talking to a few people, and we came up with this." She lifted a ladleful of the goo from the cauldron and let it fall back in with a _plop_, nodding across the fire at Lobsang as she did so.

Magrat added a handful of herbs, which made the potion shift to a sickening puce, and give off a great cloud of purple steam. "I still think it's a bad idea," she said, balancing baby Esme on her hip. "The reason being, there's still zombies back there. Bombs or...this, it's all going to go wahooni-shaped when we take that wall down."

"Why _are _we takin' the wall down, Esme?" Nanny asked, feeding the fire. "Have to agree with Magrat that it seems a bit dippy."

Granny glanced at Lobsang again. "He says the castle can only keep his kind out so long as its illusion remains unbroken. We take away its glamour, and anything can get inside."

Nanny blinked. "If you say so." Esme she'd trust with her life (and had), but she didn't know much about this rather twitchy young man, beyond the fact that he was Time's son. He looked to be about Shawn's age, but there was an indefinable air of experience about him, that jarred badly with his youthful appearance. He was much like Susan in that respect--Nanny wasn't surprised they were sweet on each other, even if they were both too daft to properly admit it.

"All right, so we take down the enchantment," Magrat said, sitting down with the baby. "That doesn't do anything about the...Auditors, though. If they're not alive, we can't exactly kill them."

Lobsang spoke for the first time. "That's what we're here for," he said, jerking his head at the other personifications. "Some of us have dealt with them before--we can probably handle it again. They're still a ways away yet, anyway--we've got to get past the zombies first."

"Which is where _they_ come in." Granny's eyes flickered to the swarm of Nac mac Feegle. "Alive, undead--they don't much care. Two of 'em could take a zombie apart in less than five minutes."

Agnes' interest in the conversation flagged at this point--not because she wasn't actually curious, but because Bilious had wandered by again. She'd been doing her best to ignore him--if Granny could do it, she should be able to, as well--but that was highly difficult whenever he came into close proximity. The blush woke and immediately started to spread, slowly but inexorably, and she turned her face away, hot to the roots of her hair. She knew that it was only an enchantment, but it was a damned effective one, and rational thinking was only moderately effective against it. If he kept staggering by in search of flowers, she was going to push him over into the grass that matched his face so nicely, and do things even Perdita hadn't thought of.

_Oh, I'm sure I've thought of them_, Perdita said, rather nastily. _Come on, let me take over--he'll forget all about that blind bint, once I'm through with him._

Agnes _felt_ the blush deepen, and was certain that steam would soon curl from her ears. Perdita always did have rotten timing, but lately it had gotten even worse.

She was spared any further discomfort--at least, of the personal variety--by Albert, who popped out of the trees like a malignant jack-in-the-box, accompanied by the odor of a foul roll-up. He was followed by the muttering, reeking figure of Foul Ole Ron, whom he appeared to have recruited as a two-legged donkey. He was currently holding a large sack, which, if the squirming and cursing were any indication, contained something that very much did not want to be in it.

"'ve got an idea," he said, glaring around at them all. "Not so sure it's a _good _idea, but it just might work." He shuffled his feet, and his glare, if possible, intensified. "I might need your help, Mistress Weatherwax."

She raised an eyebrow. "How so?"

"Well, you're the only one who's managed to resist the effects of...er...that thing." He jerked his head at the sack, and Agnes, with a horrible sinking feeling, realized just what it contained.

Granny sat a moment in silence. "I see," she said. "I'm thinkin' I can guess what you're planning."

Agnes couldn't, and didn't even want to try, but as usual, nobody asked her. Albert, somehow managing to look surly, sheepish, and hopeful all at once, offered Granny his arm. After a moment she took it, a crooked arch of her eyebrows her only change in expression, and the pair proceeded into the woods, leaving Magrat and Agnes to gawk in unison. Foul Ole Ron surveyed them all, and with a grave utterance of, "Bugrit", followed the pair into the trees.

Nanny's pipe fell from her mouth. "...And here I thought I was unshockable," she croaked, her eyes gone round. It was bad enough that Esme had willingly taken the bloke's arm--Nanny would swear that Granny had almost _smiled_.

Behind her, Ridcully feverishly wound his crossbow.


	8. Someone's Doom, At Any Rate

A/N: And it only gets worse. Flee, people. While you still can. Shorter chapter this time, but what the hell, I'll make up for it with the next one, in which battle will be joined, food will be flung, and all will generally go from bad to worse.

------

Once they were safely into the woods, Granny released Albert's arm and poked him, hard.

"All right, mister, what's this all about?" she demanded. If she was suffering any residual effects from the Cupid's arrow, she sure wasn't showing it, and Albert, for once in his extraordinarily long life, felt just a bit uneasy. He knew she couldn't really hurt him--Life had done something to him, to bring him down here, and from what he understood he wasn't properly alive while he was in the world--but just looking at her gave him a feeling that she could do things to him that would make him _wish _she could kill him.

"Er, well, I had an idea." He shook the sack, which cursed again. "I figured, since this thing's caused us all so much trouble, we might...turn it loose on our enemies, like."

A slight widening of the eyes was all the response Granny gave. She eyed the sack speculatively, crossing her arms, and Albert reflected that two thousand years of life--most of them spent as Death's manservant--wasn't enough to prepare a person for the sheer force of Granny Weatherwax's sapphire gaze.

"_Really_," she said, the word scarcely more than a breath. And then she grinned.

Most of the people of Lancre were justifiably terrified of Granny's grin. They had good reason to be--many of them had known her their entire lives, and in reputation she had surpassed even the infamous Black Aliss. If Granny were a volcano, the sight of her smile would be enough to send the villagers scurrying for an appropriate sacrifice--it was a known terror, something to be placated as soon as was humanly possible.

But Albert, who knew very little of Granny, who should have had no reason to find her smile unnerving--Albert, who had faced mages and Sourcerors and things from the Dungeon Dimensions with teeth on their eyelids--found himself involuntarily backing away. He fought the urge to fork the sign of the Evil Eye, something he hadn't done since he was a little boy.

Suddenly, he felt very, very sorry for the poor bastard on the other side.

Granny clapped her hands, and the sound was like the first creaking hinges of the doors that held back Doom.

"Follow me," she said.

------

These last few days had been filled with firsts for Susan. She'd been surprised, and bored, and utterly infuriated, but now, in a most definite first, she was beginning to feel like a pillock.

"Look, this isn't going to work," she said, crossing her arms. "I _can't _walk through walls here--I've got a lump the size of a teacup on my forehead to prove it. I can't fade, and though I still know where everyone is, I don't see what kind of good that does me."

She sighed, blowing a wisp of frizz out of her face. Failure was not an oft-used word in Susan's personal vocabulary, but she was becoming intimately acquainted with its meaning now.

Vetinari handed her another chunk of wood. "Now, now, practice makes perfect," he said. "The Rhoxi wasn't built in a day, you know."

Susan ground her teeth, shut her eyes, and raised her hand. Being able to wave through solid objects was so commonplace to her that she usually had to concentrate to make certain it _didn't _happen, but here, try as she would, she couldn't do it. Sure enough, as she brought her hand down, it thunked hard on the wood, which remained obdurately solid.

"AAAARGHH!" she screamed, all her pent-up frustration finally reaching criticality. Her eyes snapped open, and she reached for the wood, intending to hurl it at the wall as she had all its predecessors--

--when, suddenly and quite without warning, it burst into flames.

The cry died in her throat, and her eyes widened to the size of saucers. She snatched her hand away, sucking on a blistered finger, watching with horrified fascination as the flaming thing ate through the desk and landed on the carpet, where it promptly dissolved into ash. The heat it threw off was immense--she could feel the ends of her hair scorching--and just as swiftly as it had started it died, leaving nothing but soot and charred burn-marks in its passage.

"...Buh," she said helplessly, and sat down hard on the ottoman. She knew well what powers were in Death's--and, by association, her--repertoire, and bursting things into flames with her mind wasn't among them. She looked sharply up at Vetinari, still far too floored to produce anything like coherent speech, and saw to her shock that he was smiling, his fingers once again steepled before his face.

"Very good," he said, his tone businesslike, as though spontaneous, rage-induced combustion were a perfectly everyday occurrence. "I think we might be able to do something with that."

Susan swallowed, desperately marshalling her powers of common sense like a beggar gathering rags. "But...but I can't _do _that," she said at last. "I mean, Granddad can't do that, and I can only do the things he can--can't I? It wouldn't make _sense_, otherwise."

Vetinari arched an eyebrow. "My dear child, clearly you have not explored the full extent of your own powers. If you wish sense, look at the evidence--the wood is clearly incinerated, and I believe we both know that _I _am not capable of such an act."

"I wouldn't put money on it," she muttered, shaking her head. Vetinari, probably wisely, elected not to comment.

"That therefore leaves only one other option--you. Pyrokinesis is not unheard of, and while it is usually the province of witches, it does not surprise me to find the ability in you. Magic is all connected, and while Death may operate by some other means, you are, as you yourself have put it, 'mostly human'. Humans use magic. It's a relatively simple equation, really."

Susan, still not fully convinced, bit her lip. "...Do you think I could do it to Teatime?" she asked, a sudden unholy glint in her eyes. Vetinari smiled dryly.

"Possibly, but I would not attempt it just yet. I gave Carrot a message to send back to Ankh-Morpork, and I am hopeful that its recipient will make haste to answer it. Until then, I suggest we all remain as inconspicuous as possible."

Susan snorted. "Where's the fun in that?" she muttered, and winced--clearly, all her time as a teacher was rubbing off on her, and not in a good way. Vetinari raised his eyebrows.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm just not used to sitting around this much...I want to _do _something."

In the distance, there came a sound that distinctly resembled a "WAAAAAAAAAAAAARK!"

_CRUNCH_

"...If I'm not very much mistaken, I think that you will be able to, quite shortly." Vetinari tilted his head to one side, listening intently, and smiled. "Just in time for sunset. How...symbolic."

It would be. More so than even Vetinari had any idea.

------

It was mid-afternoon in Ankh-Morpork, and Moist von Lipwig was sorting mail. He didn't normally do it--as head of the Post Office, he was usually busy with other things--but he liked to get into the main offices occasionally, just to show an interest. Besides, with the Patrician missing, half the city had gone mad, and sorting mail was a dull but soothing activity.

He was halfway through the last sack when he became aware of a distant roaring, growing steadily louder. Cursing under his breath, he abandoned his task and hurried up the stairs to the main floor, wondering what in hell had gone wrong now. The entire building was shaking, the windows rattling in time to the steady _thud-thud _that sounded overhead, and when he crested the stairs he found that both employees and customers had dove under whatever cover they could find.

"It's an earthquake!" Groat hissed, clinging to a table leg.

"It _can't _be an earthquake--we're on loam." Adora Belle von Lipwig, _nee_ Dearhart, had nearly swallowed her cigarette at the start of the tremors. "Moist, I think we're being bombed."

It wasn't a bomb, however; nor was it an earthquake. The roaring peaked, something thudded onto the roof, and then the noise quickly faded into a series of dull _whap-whaps_ that trailed into silence.

"What in hell's name is going _on _here?" Moist demanded, as the main doors swung open. "Hey, I'm trying to run a government institution here, pal!"

The man who had entered was unknown to him--his age was indeterminate, but he looked like the brighter class of alchemist, the sort that singes the eyebrows without losing them entirely.

"Oh, I do apologize." The eccentric gentleman rummaged in the pockets of his frayed robe, and eventually produced a somewhat crumpled envelope. "Lord Vetinari asked Carrot to ask me to ask you to deliver this to the reporters of the _Ankh-Morpork Times_, if you would be so good."

Moist stared. His life as a criminal had brought him into contact with all sorts of loonies, but, with dawning horror, he realized that this one was more than just a loony. He'd never actually _seen _Leonard of Quirm, but he'd heard stories, and this man's air of barmy gentility seemed to fit perfectly with what he'd heard.

"Oh, gods," he groaned, taking the envelope. "I don't _believe _this." Ignoring Leonard's protest, he broke the seal and unfolded the parchment within. It said, in a perfect copperplate that could only be Vetinari's,

_Mr. von Lipwig,_

_Knowing you as I do, I trust you are reading this, despite the fact that it was not addressed to you. Amusing as the current situation undoubtedly is (to certain parties, at least), this is not a joke, and I must ask you to forward the rest of this correspondence to Mr. DeWorde at the _Times_. Since the current state of affairs within the city has undoubtedly left you with little with which to occupy yourself, I might suggest that you accompany Mr. da Quirm to the newspaper offices, and thence to my current location._

_Also enclosed is the wages chitty for the City Watch--please forward it to Constable Dorfl, who is, unless I am very much mistaken, the only Watchman left in the city who can be trusted with it. _

_I have but one more request, and that is that you send Ms. Dearhart-von Lipwig to deliver the second item in Mr. da Quirm's keeping--I believe her presence will be necessary, particularly once its recipient has read it._

_sincerely,_

_Havelock Vetinari (Patrician)_

Moist groaned. He knew damn well what Vetinari meant when he 'suggested' something; if he didn't go with this Leonard, he'd live to regret it when Vetinari returned. Or, more accurately, he _wouldn't _live, which was worse.

"Fine," he said aloud. "Spike, Vetinari's asked you to deliver this." He found a second, smaller envelope beneath the parchment, which was addressed, again in Vetinari's handwriting, to _Mrs. Sybil Ramkin Vimes_.

Adora crept out from under the table, dusted herself off, and lit a cigarette. "I don't want to know," she said, looking at the envelope as though it might bite her.

"Trust me, the feeling is mutual." Moist tucked the parchment back into the ruined envelope, and placed it in his pocket. "All right, Mr. da Quirm, I suppose we'd better go. Spike, I'll meet you back here in, oh, an hour, all right?"

"I hope."

------

When Adora von Lipwig reached the house of Sybil Vimes, she found she was not the first caller. The Dean of Unseen University, having been forcibly flung through a patch of rhododendrons by his well-meaning but mathematically challenged colleagues, was sitting in the Mildly Yellow Drawing Room with an icepack on his head and a large mug of brandy. Willikins showed her in and left her, discreetly refilling the Dean's mug.

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry, Lady Sybil, I didn't realize you had...company." Adora didn't know what in hell the Dean was doing here, but judging from his expression it wasn't on any pleasant errand. "I've just been sent to deliver you this." She handed the envelope over, and for once in her life Adora Belle von Lipwig found herself shrinking back like a timid child.

Sybil Ramkin Vimes had a reputation for being a calm, capable, kindly woman, whose gentility of personality seemed to try to make up for the amount of physical space she occupied. Hardly anybody had seen her angry before, but, Adora realized with utter clarity, what she was witnessing now had slingshot far over the valleys of anger, into the shifting lava flows of Bloody Furious. The effect was rather like poking at a harmless-looking jellyfish, and realizing too late that it wanted to eat your hand off.

Sybil took the letter and read it over, her expression not changing a whit, save to grow even grimmer. "Just as I thought," she said. "Samuel Vimes, you don't know the _meaning _of the word 'trouble'."

Adora raised her eyebrows, shooting the Dean a look that said quite clearly, _Do I even want to ask? _The Dean shook his head, quite definitely.

Sybil, who had caught the look, drew a deep breath, nostrils flaring. "Sam has apparently, as the Dean so aptly put it, 'fallen off the wagon'. That must have been after Havelock wrote this letter, in which he states 'your presence would likely be a soothing influence on your husband, whom I predict will shortly crack'. Just _once _I wish that man would be wrong."

She emitted a noise between a grunt and a snort, setting the letter aside and rallying the fraying edges of her temper, with visible effort. "Thank you, Mrs. von Lipwig. I would appreciate it greatly if you could accompany us back to the Post Office. Apparently there is some sort of conveyance waiting to take me to bludgeon--er, speak to my husband."

"'Us'?" Adora questioned, eying the Dean. No sooner had the word left her mouth than Willikins, who appeared to have been badly savaged by bags of baby paraphernalia, entered. He spat out a rubber duck long enough to announce,

"Young Sam is ready, Madam."

"Oh, good. Come along, then, all of you." Sybil waved her most Duchess-y hand and swept past, Willikins following in her wake like a lugubrious tugboat. The baby himself was strapped into a carrier on the butler's back, alternately yanking at his hair and administering cheerful (and remarkably accurate) kicks to his kidneys. Adora winced.

"Vimes is a dead man," she muttered to the Dean, who was following well behind. The wizard paused, considering, as Sybil issued a stream of orders to the remaining servants.

"No, I don't think he is," he said slowly. "He'll just _wish _he was."

They followed on again, eventually managing to load themselves aboard the ancestral Ramkin carriage, and drove down to meet their doom.

Someone's doom, at any rate.

------

Meanwhile, back at the castle, Teatime was fairly twitching with excitement.

Teatime had been trained as an Assassin. Not because it was a noble profession; not because his family was wealthy and needed somewhere to fob off an extra son, as so many of the Assassins had initially been. He had been taken in by the Guild as an act of charity, the Guild not realizing at the time that he was responsible for his own dearth of immediate family, and the result had been not un-akin to raising a mongoose near the remains of Chernobyl. Instead of having a detached disregard for the value of human life, Teatime had an extreme attachment to getting rid of it. He was possibly the only Assassin in history to value the act of killing itself more than the money, a trait which made even his fellows uneasy.

Once, while profoundly intoxicated (one of the very few times he had ever been such), Teatime had tried to explain his philosophy. It was probably just as well that he'd tried explaining it to the fruit machine in the Mended Drum, because any remotely rational person who had heard it would likely have fled screaming into the night.

"Life was meant to be taken, or else why would everything be so damned easy to kill? The world and everything in it are the toys of people like me, if there actually _are _other people like me. No matter what anyone does with their life, it's all null when they die, so why bother? When we kill we are like gods, only better, because we don't need the belief of anyone but ourselves. Someday," and here he had elbowed the machine conspiratorially, ignoring the twinge in his funnybone, "someday, I'll kill Life itself. Now _that _would be a contract."

And now, at last, he had the chance to fulfill that drunken vow. His spies had reported that Life was indeed among the personifications laying siege to his castle, and while the wizards were busy bombarding it with chicken-bombs, he was planning. Or at least trying to.

The zombies would be easy enough to direct, to keep the bulk of the enemy too busy to get anywhere near him. The main problem was getting Life somewhere he could off her, without leaving him vulnerable to Death himself. The Auditors had warned him that, since he wasn't actually meant to be alive, if he so much as set foot outside the castle Death could (and probably would) get him. Fortunately for everything on the Disc, Teatime hadn't yet figured out a way around that one, though not for lack of trying.

Most people, if they thought about killing Life at all, would stop to wonder just what that would mean for, say, they themselves. Any rational person (and many irrational) would eventually reach the conclusion that if Life were inhumed, the Assassin responsible would kick the bucket along with everyone else. This little detail had utterly escaped Teatime, who, even having died once, never even considered the possibility that something bad might happen to him.

Had Teatime been left to his own devices, he probably could have inhumed Life with relatively little difficulty--after all, the woman was demonstrably two grapes short of a fruit salad. Fortunately for most of existence he was not; most of the motley crew assembled beyond the castle posed him little threat, but a few were more than formidable opponents. Brilliant though Teatime was, in his own specialized way, he had never come up against anything even remotely like the combined machinations of Albert and Granny Weatherwax. Twisted as his mind was, he had _nothing _on them, as he was (very shortly) to find out.

------

Evening was fast approaching, by the time Leonard's contraption returned to base camp, and the slanting sunlight revealed time well spent. The curtain-wall was still standing, but only just, and the zombies behind it were growing restive as bomb after bomb flew _WAAAAAARK_-ing overhead. Bonfires had been built, and the Nac mac Feegle were dancing and chanting some weird, incomprehensible war-song while beating on tiny drums.

Only one creature was missing from this warlike cavalcade, and that was Greebo. He had begged off the festivities earlier, when several of the Feegle decided to try and pull his ears off, and had crept unnoticed into the castle. The zombies, who had little use for cats and certainly didn't see them as a threat, let him in, and he was now wandering about in search of something to eat, rape, fight, or maybe all three.

He wasn't finding much. Oh, there had been a colony of were-rats, but those had provided only passing amusement, and while there was plenty else to eat, he was now in the mood for one of the other two categories--which, he didn't particularly care.

It was in this mood of relative boredom that he came upon Teatime's room. The feverish Assassin was pacing, bouncing from the end of the bed to the table like a dancer, and muttering to himself. Greebo had seen crazy people, but this one definitely took the cake when it came to sheer manic energy. He sat down and curled his tail around his feet, ready to watch the show.

"--have to do it very soon, before those idiots get started. Want to get it out of the way before I have to go and fulfill my contract," Teatime said, and giggled. He was dressed in an Assassin's best--all black silk, with his best enameled knives (used mainly for show, rather than function), his boots polished to a mirror shine. Still no jewelry--an Assassin's training ran deep--but the edges of his clothes were trimmed with a satiny black piping. He should have looked like a twit, but something in his slightly crazed good cheer precluded any indication of twittishness--he looked, as always, like the kind of person who would bite your nose off as casually as saying 'hello'.

"I really wish we had a priest, but as it is, the Privy Councilor will have to do," he muttered, adjusting his collar in the mirror above the fireplace. "I do hope Susan's cooperating with the maid..."

Greebo, disappointed that no noses appeared to be about to part company with their owners, trotted onward. One corridor over produced far better amusement, however--the door was half-cracked, and he peered around it to find a rather fantastic scene.

The Great Hall, done up in an interior decorator's worst nightmare of chintz and chiffon, filled with seats draped in bunting. A tiny, fat cherub, wearing a ferocious scowl, nocking what looked like a whole sheaf of arrows into its bow. Lying on the floor all around it, like the sleeping guards in a fairy story, was what looked like half the palace staff, some still with decorations clutched in limp hands. Each and every one had a serene, dreamy smile on their face, and each and every one also had a pink arrow protruding from some portion of their anatomy.

Greebo grinned. Cats aren't big on symbolism, but a lifetime spent around Nanny Ogg had taught Greebo a few things about the human world. And from what he could see, this was shaping up to be the most entertaining night of his little feline life.


	9. All's Fair in War and, uh, War

A/N: Heee...I do apologize for the appalling amount of time it took me to update--RL, original works, and assorted other duties kept me from this fic for far too long. In answer to TrisakAminawn's question, I can't see how I'd get the _Pyramids_ cast in here and still have it make sense, but if I do figure it out I'll give it a shot. When I set out to include everyone, I didn't quite stop to think just what exactly that would entail.

Also, to all who are wondering, I haven't yet read _Thud_, so any new characters introduced therein won't be in here until I have. (I'm hoping to get it soon, but hardbound books are expensive, and I'm poor). You may also recognize Delirium, whose persona I have borrowed from Neil Gaiman's _Sandman_. That said, I warn you all in advance that this chapter is nuttier than a fruitcake, and may just break your brain a little. (I know it broke _mine_ a little, writing it). Susan is going to be a bit out of character in places, but given her pact with Vetinari (which you'll find out about eventually), she's meant to be, so don't kill me on that score. ;)

------

_BOOM_

On the swiftly-darkening field outside the castle, what for lack of a better term must be called the army waited. Torches flickered and danced, bonfires flared high, and the Nac mac Feegle sent up a weird, unearthly keening until Granny gave them a Look, whereupon they all shut up and sulked.

Most of them were sitting on their...contraption, a creation of wood and stone and wire whose function even Leonard wouldn't have been able to guess. He hadn't yet returned from Ankh-Morpork, but the walls were nearly down and the ragtag army couldn't wait for him.

They stood without any apparent order, but a keen (if slightly neurotic) observer would have been able to see that there was some thought to their arrangement. Bookending the horde on either side were the wizards, who were still industriously hurling their chicken-bombs, and the witches, all of whom save Granny were still assiduously stirring their cauldron. Granny sat beside Albert on a log, a grim little smile playing about her lips--they hadn't told the others just what they'd done with the cupid, but to Granny it was more than poetic justice. If she noticed the acid glares Ridcully was shooting her from across the meadow, she gave no sign, nor did her ramrod posture change.

War had attempted to organize the personifications into battle formation, but had run up against their natural stubbornness and disinclination to cooperate with absolutely anything, including, occasionally, gravity. Only the other four Horsemen were paying him any attention; the rest were bickering among themselves like spoiled children. Lobsang, who had said hardly a word over the last day, stood with his arms crossed, glaring at the castle as though willing it to explode, and Life, who had found a patch of spotted mushrooms and become, if possible, even more incoherent, was dancing about singing to herself in gibberish. It probably hadn't helped that she'd run across Delirium, who had been dancing with her until she fell over and started a conversation with a likely-looking rock.

Carrot and Angua had joined the wizards by the catapult, mainly to keep them out of trouble, while Colon was attempting to slap (fortunately not literally) some sense into Vimes. The latter had gotten over the worst of his drunken bender, but had the kind of hangover that is the stuff of legends, and unless he snapped out of it soon was going to be next to useless in combat.

"All right, when that wall goes down, you and you move around in the classic Pincer formation, while you--I say, old boy, are you listening?" War glanced at Death, who was scowling fixedly at something to his left. That something turned out to be Rincewind, who had brought Life a bouquet of dandelions. It shouldn't have been possible for a skull to scowl, but Death was managing it, and War snapped his fingers, more than a little amused in spite of everything. "Later," he said. "Now, as I was saying, you--"

He never got to finish the sentence, for, with one final, massive _BOOM_, the curtain-wall finally collapsed.

------

Inside the castle, Susan was not happy. And when Susan wasn't happy, she tended to spread it around with a big shovel, which was why half the maids were on the verge of nervous breakdowns.

Teatime had summoned her half an hour before, giggling like a lunatic, and had then locked her in a room full of terrified ladies' maids and directed them to, "You know, get her ready, or whatever it is you people do." Susan hadn't like the sound of that at all, and once she found out just what the maids were meant to be getting her ready _for_, she'd sat down, crossed her arms, and flatly refused to budge, no matter how they begged and pleaded.

"Uh-uh," she said, shaking her head. "Not a chance in the seven hells."

"_Please_, miss," begged a maid--Molly, or Polly, or Dolly; Susan couldn't keep them straight. "Just put it on, there's a good lass."

"What part of 'no' don't you understand?" Susan asked, exasperated.

The 'it' in question was a wedding dress. Most definitely a wedding dress. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, and Susan would shave her head before she'd get anywhere near it.

"But miss, please, if you don't, he'll get...upset," pleaded another maid.

"Let him," Susan snorted. In her current mood, she felt more than capable of handling anything Teatime could dish out. Should he be unwise enough to get within three feet of her, he was going to wind up crippled for the rest of his life, which would be about three seconds.

"But _miss_...he won't let us out until you put it on." Dolly gave Susan a desperate smile, holding up one satin sleeve. No doubt visions of eventual cannibalism had already crossed her mind--she knew Teatime meant what he said, though if they took too long he would probably just break the door down and deal out sharp pointies on a democratic basis.

"Good," Susan retorted, and scowled so blackly that the maid winced.

A knock sounded at the door, and a relieved Polly went to answer it, hoping it was someone who could talk some sense into Susan.

Much to her surprise, it was Lord Vetinari, who took one look at furious Susan and arched a sardonic eyebrow. "I thought you might be a bit...displeased," he said, stepping in around the maid's curtsey. "And while I agree with the sentiment, you're not going to do any good if you're stuck in here."

Susan opened her mouth, ready to tear the Patrician to pieces, but he held up a hand. "No, wait," he said. "You can attack me all you like once I've finished, but pray _let _me finish."

To her surprise, Susan's mouth shut with a snap. "All right," she growled. "You've got one minute, and I'm timing you."

Vetinari smiled slightly, the smile of someone who just _knows _that something truly awful is going to happen to someone who desperately deserves it, and leaned over to whisper in her ear. Susan's expression changed from wrathful to shocked to horribly amused, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a shriek of laughter.

"So you see," Vetinari said, in more normal tones, "it would behoove us all if you were to cooperate, at least as much as you are able, because I would truly appreciate your presence in the hall."

The maids looked at Susan and shuddered in unison. Her face looked as though Hogswatch had just come early, and had contained enough explosives to level half of Ankh-Morpork.

"Just think of it as...a play," Vetinari continued. "You must act the part, at least until intermission, at which time you can throw off the chains of your oppressors and, quite possibly, chain _up_ the oppressors instead."

Susan considered this for a moment. Much as she didn't want to put the loathsome garment on, what Vetinari had told her was just too rich to pass up--she supposed it would be worth the loss of dignity, just to see what happened.

"All right," she said at last. "But I'm warning you now, if what you've told me is wrong, I'll do to you what I did to that kindling."

"I shall consider myself duly warned," Vetinari said, and with another of his disturbing little smiles, he bowed himself out.

Molly looked at Dolly. "I don't want to know what he said to her," she murmured, low.

"Me neither. But if it gets her into that dress and saves all our necks, it's worth it."

Get Susan into 'that dress' and consequently save their necks it did. However, within half an hour, Dolly would certainly be questioning whether or not _anything _was worth it.

------

The curtain-wall's collapse was, as even War had to admit, truly impressive. It didn't just fall over, it seemed to implode, shooting clouds of dust and debris into the darkening sky, and it went on for a long, long time. He held up a hand, restraining his troops from simply rushing forward, and sat to wait until the dust had cleared a little. He knew full well they'd be facing zombies, but between the lot of them, zombies wouldn't be much obstacle.

He glanced down his assembled line of...men. He'd been quite impressed by the Piecemaker, which Detritus was busily loading, and with some of the contraptions Leonard had come up with. Most of the assembled horde bore some weapon or other devised by him, and War, looking at them, couldn't help but feel supremely sorry for the zombies.

At the end of the line stood Vimes. He'd sobered up remarkably well, aided by a potion given him by Granny Weatherwax, and he was looking reflectively at the castle. Sybil, when she'd arrived, hadn't given him the tongue-lashing he'd expected; she'd looked sad, which had been immeasurably worse. It never occurred to him to realize that Sybil, who knew him far better than anyone, would _know _that her sadness would be more effective than any tirade, but she did, and had outdone herself in making him realize the error of his ways. Consequently he'd made what had to be the most heartfelt apology of his life, and stood now waiting to face an army of zombies with the knowledge that he'd rather cut his own head off than touch any alcohol again.

It was with this in mind that he found himself confronted by Nanny Ogg, trailed as ever by the faithful Nobby. She had a large copper contraption on her back, and was offering some of its contents to anyone who would take it. Everybody who knew Nanny had (wisely) declined, but a few of the personifications had unwarily partaken, and were now swaying slightly like trees in a stiff breeze.

"No thanks," Vimes said, as a haze of alcohol that was almost solid hit him. "I'm off the stuff."

"Your loss," Nanny said cheerfully, moving on to the next unsuspecting victim, who turned out to be Life.

"Hair of the dog?" she offered, holding out a wooden tankard.

Life took it, sniffed at it, and promptly went cross-eyed. "What's in it?" she asked.

"Apples. Well, mainly apples."

"Oh, so it's a fruit drink. Okay." She promptly downed the mug's contents in one gulp, belched, and passed it back. "Not bad."

Nanny stared at her. Quite apart from the fact that anyone, immortal or not, who drank scumble that fast should be horizontal, Life wasn't even swaying.

_It must be all them mushrooms_, she thought, shaking her head.

Death had sidled up to Life, scythe in one hand and a bouquet of dead daisies in the other.

ER...I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE THESEhe said, shifting from foot to bony foot. It took a minute for Life's eyes to focus on them, but when they did, she beamed.

"Awww," she said. "Thank you." She took the flowers, which promptly un-wilted and burst into bloom, and stuck them here and there in her wild hair.

If a skull could have blushed, Death would have, but he was saved from any further embarrassment by the untimely arrival of Rincewind, who'd apparently had the same idea. Rincewind took one look at Death, however, and dove behind Ridcully, who had his crossbow in one hand and a fully-charged staff in the other.

"Say, you haven't seen that Albert chap around, have you?" he asked, a glint in his eyes that boded no good for the object of his search.

"Over there," Life said, pointing. "But those won't do any good, you know."

"Oh, we'll see about that," Ridcully muttered, wandering off and leaving Rincewind as exposed as a limpet out of its shell.

"Er, hahaha," Rincewind said, positively pop-eyed with terror. "I was just...er...leaving." He raced off so quickly he tripped over his own feet.

THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT, Death said, with some satisfaction. Before he could do anything more, however, the zombies charged.

------

The castle's Great Hall, which more than lived up to its name, had until now been a dark, grim, and forbidding place. It wasn't anymore--it seemed that among the people the Auditors had plucked for Teatime's use, one of them had been an interior decorator. Dark stone was softened with woven tapestries and festooned with garlands of flowers, while the tables were laid with white linen and silver plate. Candles blazed from every available nook and cranny, glittering off the gilt and crystal. It looked like a little girl's dream wedding, if that little girl was the sort who dreamed about that kind of thing.

Susan, needless to say, had not been. She'd seen the Hall, briefly, before the maids had led her to the antechamber where she was meant to wait. They'd gotten her into the dress, but her hair, mirroring her mood, had stubbornly refused to cooperate, and stood about her head like an angry cloud. She'd also retained her boots--they weren't quite as sturdy as witch's boots, but they would be more than adequate to kick Teatime where the sun didn't shine, should the opportunity provide itself. The poker was tucked into one of them, hiding safely under her dress, though she was finding it more than a bit difficult to walk without revealing it.

Brief though her vision had been, it had been enough to assure her that something was decidedly wrong. Much of the staff was mooning at one another, too busy making calf's eyes to pay proper attention to their tasks, oblivious to almost all save the object of their gaze. The butler was so distracted he managed to set his sleeve afire, and from the look of things the whole situation was only going to get worse--it could only be a matter of time before some abstracted swain set the entire building alight.

Susan wanted to watch. No, that wasn't quite accurate--Susan wanted to _help_.

She could still hear the sound of the wall being bombarded by…whatever the hell it was being bombarded by; it sounded like chickens, but she couldn't be sure. It couldn't take that much longer, and she devoutly hoped it would collapse before this farce of a ceremony progressed too far.

One of the maids--it might have been Polly--caught up with her, dragging her off into a small anteroom because, "Well, you know, it's bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the ceremony." It would certainly be bad luck for Teatime, but Susan followed the maid anyway, knowledge of Vetinari's plan resting in her mind like a Hogswatch present.

She wasn't there very long--after perhaps twenty minutes a rather over-enthusiastic wedding march commenced, and she found herself being ushered out into the main hall. There was nothing for it--she had to at least make it up the aisle, preferably without killing anyone, so she ground her teeth and marched. Actually, that wasn't quite accurate--she _stalked_, a far stalkier stalk than Death himself could have managed, glaring at all and sundry as though daring them to breathe wrong.

There being no priest in the castle, Vetinari had been tagged to officiate. He stood now behind the altar, hands folded, utterly composed, watching Susan with well-concealed amusement. Such a very _angry_ young woman…she reminded him of a more intellectual Vimes, and his practice with Vimes was all that allowed him to exercise any influence over her at all.

Susan marched up to the dais and, unable to resist, kicked Teatime in the shin. He winced slightly, but his rather manic grin didn't falter--not that Susan noticed, as she was scrupulously avoiding looking at him, lest she haul off and smash his face in. She might have done so anyway had not Vetinari, with a gravity and solemnity not to be described in words, tipped her a wink.

She glared at him, a glare that said all too clearly, _This had better be worth it._

And he gave her a small smile that said, _Oh, it will be._

"Brethren and, ah, Sistren, we are gathered here today in the sight of one another to join these two in holy…oh, dear, what _is _this word? Ah, yes, holy mattress-money." Vetinari made a show of squinting at the missal's small print, ignoring the brief titter that ran through the crowd. "Before we begin, if anyone has any reason why these two should not be joined in marriage, speak now or forever hold your peace."

Every eye in the hall zeroed in on Susan, whose teeth were grinding audibly from the effort of refraining from screaming her own objections. Teatime alone seemed oblivious, or else he simply didn't care--it was difficult to tell, with him.

_BOOM_.

The sound of the barrage that had been pelting the curtain-wall reached a particularly invasive level, and outside some bit of masonry crumbled. Susan glanced to the tall windows, unable and unwilling to wait much longer--if they didn't have the wall down within the next five minutes, she was throwing the whole plan to hell and impale Teatime with the poker.

"Marriage is a solemn state, not to be entered into lightly," Vetinari went on. "It is a commitment that is meant to last forever, or at least until death--" here both Susan and Teatime choked on a laugh, though for vastly different reasons "--and should therefore be a union cemented only by those who are ready to shoulder the load of such responsibility."

How in all the gods' names he was keeping a straight face through this, Susan didn't know, but he was putting on a damned good show. Not that anybody was paying more than cursory attention--most of the guests and servants were casting cow-eyes at one another, and the more adventurous were going for surreptitious groping.

"Yes, yes, get on with it," Teatime said, his good eye darting to the windows as well; he clearly wanted to be outside, killing something.

Vetinari fixed him with a beady eye. "Young man, do you want this done properly or not?"

Teatime did a small jig of impatience. "I--well, yes, of course I do," he said. "But you can do it properly _and _quickly, can't you?"

"Not if you keep interrupting, he can't," Susan snapped, unable to resist. Vetinari had told her to help him stall things, but she hadn't counted on Teatime holding everything up as well. "At this rate we'll never get to eat."

Teatime looked at her. "All you can think of is the _food?_" he demanded. That wasn't how a prospective queen was supposed to think on her wedding day--he should know, he'd read all about it.

"Well, what else am I supposed to think about, you twit?" she retorted. "I certainly didn't _ask _to be here, now did I? This was all your idea, Mr. I'm Going To Be King Of The Bloody World!"

"You can't talk to me like that!" Teatime said, waving a finger in her face. "I'm going to be your husband!"

Susan considered and rejected the idea of biting his finger off. "Says WHO?" she nearly snarled. "_I _didn't volunteer for this…this…this _mess_, nor did anyone else here. Even if I wasn't already--" She stopped, realizing what she'd been about to say. "Even if I wasn't already tied up by a career, _you _are the last person on the whole of the Disc I would even consider being in the same _room _with, let alone marrying. You're a spoiled, crazy, evil little sod--_Vetinari _would make a better husband than you, and he throws people into scorpion pits!"

"Thank you," Vetinari interjected dryly.

Teatime blinked, clearly twitching his train of thought onto another line. He cast Vetinari a suspicious look. "Is _that _what this is all about?" he said, turning away from Susan to face the Patrician. "You're trying to steal my queen, aren't you?" he demanded shrilly.

"This isn't _chess_, you twit!" Susan snapped. "You can't steal people!"

"We'll see about that," Teatime said brightly, drawing one of his ornamental knives.

"Oh, good _grief_," Vetinari sighed. Much as Susan was clearly enjoying herself, this couldn't go on. Before he could stop it, however, several things happened at once: the curtain wall collapsed, Susan gave in and slugged Teatime, and the plush red carpet leading up to the altar burst into flames.

"Weddings certainly bring out the best in people," Vetinari mused, shaking his head. And then, as he had fully expected, everything went straight to hell.

------

The front flank of the zombies came racing out of the curtain wall's ruins like rockets, waving various weapons and screaming like banshees. They were prepared for anything--except for the Piecemaker, which went off with a deafening boom and took out not only the first wave of zombies, but half the second wave, several birds overhead, and a luckless badger a dozen yards _behind _Detritus. Bits of flaming wood rained down, pattering gently onto the grass as Detritus rewound the great bow.

"Ooo, pretty lights," Life said happily, batting at one.

The wizards didn't give up on their chicken-machine simply because the wall had fallen--they were having far too much fun with it. Otto Chriek had wound up next to them, and was snapping iconographs like mad, murmuring about lighting and speed and occasionally screaming at them to hold still for a moment. William and Sacharissa were both scribbling like mad, while Killer von Lipwig puffed away at a cigarette and remarked that they'd have to issue a stamp for this one.

The personifications squared up, ready to make a run for it as soon as the supply of zombies was exhausted. Even without the wall, they wouldn't be able to get through to the castle until the witches had done their bit; Magrat and Agnes were hurriedly ladling their potion into bottles, which Nanny was distributing to the wizards. Granny and Albert, both of whom were still looking insufferably pleased with themselves, sat off to one side and watched the whole process with smug satisfaction.

The Watch edged in behind the personifications, ready to act as the middle flank. Colon and Nobby were looking distinctly nervous--they'd seen battles, but generally from the back, and never against anything this…weird. Carrot, Angua, and Vimes were calm enough, though none of them looked overly pleased to have Foul Ole Ron standing off to their right; his Smell was perming their nose hairs.

Death seized the dancing Life by the back of her dressing-gown, picked her up, and handed her to Delirium.

KEEP HER OUT OF THE WAYhe said. SHE'S THE ONE THEY'RE AFTER. THE REST OF US ARE JUST…OBSTACLES.

"Right-O," Delirium said happily. "Oh, look, mushrooms."

"All right, you lot, it's now or never," Nanny said, handing off the last of the bottled potion. "Go on and lob it already."

Ponder accordingly turned the winch, releasing the catch that held the arms that flung the bottles high, high into the air. They didn't even reach the castle before they exploded, showering the meadow with nauseatingly glittery bubbles. The air seemed to shudder, sucking in on itself like a reverse thunderclap, and the image of the castle flickered for a moment.

"That's your cue, boys," Granny said, nodding to War. "Have at it."

They needed no further urging. The personifications surged forward, followed by the Watch, followed by the Nac mac Feegle, who were wheeling their strange contraption along with cries of, "Hup! Hup! Bigjobs!" Last of all came the wizards, staffs at the ready, and Nanny Ogg, who still bore her portable still.

The whole cavalcade crashed into what remained of the zombies, attacking indiscriminately, and managed to hack and beat and kick a path straight to the castle proper, where another blast from the Piecemaker reduced the great front doors to matchwood.

Once inside the castle they scattered, hurrying hither and yon through the hallways, not knowing where they were going nor, in most cases, what they were even looking for. It might have taken them longer to find out, but at that fortuitous moment the doors of the Great Hall burst open and emitted a confused, milling press of humanity, who were either pummeling or snogging one another (and, in some cases, both). Smoke billowed out, dousing the castle's denizens and invaders alike in a thick, choking fog.

"Windows!" Ridcully yelled, and at once every window in the castle blasted outward in a glittering, tinkling rain of glass. Some of the smoke was sucked outside, but a good deal of it remained, and the brawling mass could still hardly tell friend from foe.

Through it all Death strode, occasionally pausing to swing his scythe at some luckless individual, until he'd pushed his way into the Great Hall. The chaos was little less in here, but that didn't matter--he was only interested in two people, and after scarcely a second of looking he found them.

The first was Teatime, who came careening through the hall like a rogue billiard ball. He was giggling madly, as though the whole mess were nothing more than a colossal joke, and he skidded past Death with scarcely a glance. Next came Susan, in the ridiculous white fairy-tale dress, wielding a brass fireplace poker and bearing down on Teatime like an avenging fate.

"Get back here, you little twerp!" she cried, whacking at anyone unfortunate enough to get in her way. "I killed you once, and by gods I'll--oh, hullo, Grandfather." She skidded to a halt in mid-flight, nearly impaling one of the maids with the poker. "Took you long enough."

I SEE YOU'VE MADE SOME FRIENDSDeath mused. WHAT WERE YOU INTENDING TO DO WITH THAT?

Susan glanced down at the poker. "Make history repeat itself," she said. "Did you see where he went?"

UP TO THE ROOF, I BELIEVE.

She raised the poker, examining it closely. "This isn't going to do it," she said. "I need the sword."

ARE YOU SURE-- Death started, but she held up a hand.

"I want to make sure he stays dead this time," she said, dropping the poker and holding out her hand. "Look, I'll give it _back_--this just requires a…personal touch. After all," she said, and smiled grimly, "didn't you tell Father the sword was reserved for kings?"

Death considered this. WELL, he said, WHEN YOU PUT IT _THAT_ WAY…. He drew the sword and handed it to her. NOW BE CAREFUL, he admonished. YOU KNOW IT'S DANGEROUS.

Susan eyed the sword with satisfaction. "Good," she said grimly, and disappeared into the mayhem.

------

Teatime had not, in fact, gone to the roof. He had fled instead to his rooms, where he discarded his useless ornamental knives and replaced them with plain, fully functional ones. These bastards were ruining his wedding--_someone_ was going to pay for this. He'd just got all his assorted tools together when a knock sounded at his door, and two women--females, at least--lurched drunkenly through it.

"It's a _party_," said one, the taller one, her mismatched eyes darting to and fro and finally crossing.

"And nobody invited us," said the other, shaking her head.

Teatime stared. He couldn't _believe_ his luck--no job, no contract had ever been this easy. The Auditors had told him what--who--he was looking for, and now she was standing in front of him, munching on a spotted mushroom and beaming at him with the cheerful grin of one who is clearly drugged to the eyeballs.

He raised his sword, the dying sunlight that streamed through the window turning the blade red.

"Hello, Life," he said, and grinned at her. "I've been looking for you."

----

A/N: Heehee! I'd say there's two, maybe three more chapters of this, and then it'll be over and done with.


	10. Hey, Maybe There'll Be Cake

A/N: Hee! Onward, at long, looong last. To answer Adelpha's question about the wizards, that was entirely me buggering up my timelines--I'll probably go back and fix it eventually, once I've finished this monstrosity. (If I ever do…jeeze, it's taking me forever). Kudos to anybody who catches the Stephen King reference.

Once again, I own nothing here except Life, and I'm not terribly anxious to claim her. The rest belongs to the incomparable Terry Pratchett, with the exception of Delirium, who belongs to Neil Gaiman.

------

Life gave Teatime a happy smile, munching another mushroom. "Have you? That's so sweet!" She poked Delirium, from whose hair random butterflies kept escaping. "Isn't that sweet?"

"As toejam," Delirium agreed.

Teatime blinked, momentarily nonplussed. He looked as though he was considering commenting, but apparently thought better of it. "Yes, Life, I have," he whispered, giggling, and with all the blurring speed of a striking snake he brought the sword around, impaling it up to the hilt in her sternum.

"…Oh." Life looked down, staring at the weapon protruding from her chest. "Why'd you do _that?_" Slapping Teatime's hand away, she grasped the hilt and pulled the blade free, her glazed eyes regarding it sadly. "This isn't my dressing gown," she mourned. "I mean, they can patch it, but patches always show." She tossed the sword aside and turned to Teatime. "That was _mean_, you…you…meanie!"

Teatime stared at her, and rolled his eyes in annoyance. Of course--normal weapons wouldn't work on her, would they? Just because she was corporeal didn't mean she was mortal.

"Well, bugger," he muttered. "Where am I going to find a weapon that will actually _kill _you?"

Whereupon, narrative causality being what it is, Susan came crashing through the door, the sword of Death clenched in her hands, radiating such vindictive fury that even Delirium did a double-take.

"Oh _Tea_time," she said, infusing the deliberate mispronunciation with as much venom as a cobra, "we need to _talk_."

------

Vimes, Carrot, Angua, Colon, Nobby, and Cheery were in the Great Hall. They hadn't planned to be there, but the tide of humanity being what it was, they'd been washed inside like drifting seaweed, albeit seaweed that punched and kicked and stabbed back. To Vimes it felt like the Glorious 25th would have felt, had all the participants been on hard drugs--only half the people were actually _fighting_; the rest seemed to be sneaking off to odd corners and indulging in things that were best done in private.

"What in hells is going _on _here?" Colon panted, dodging a flying hamhock. "This isn't a battle, it's…it's…."

"A free-for-all," Nobby supplied, catching the ham and tearing off a chunk. "With free food, too--if anybody throws any apples, try and catch 'em." He had procured a bag from gods alone knew where, into which he was stuffing all the unattended goodies he could reach.

"Nobby, it's _war_," Angua said, exasperated. "You're not supposed to be nicking food!"

"'s not war," Nobby said, spearing a melon out of the air with his pike. "Looks like just about every other wedding I've ever been to."

That worried Vimes a bit. It _did _look like they'd interrupted a wedding--or would have, if it hadn't been set on fire first. He didn't know what he'd been expecting to find in the castle, but it wasn't this.

"All right, we've got to get out of here," he said. "Vetinari won't be in the middle of this mess, I'm sure of it--we'll have to split up."

"You sure that's a good idea, sir?" Carrot asked, fending off a roast goose. "We split up in here, we might never find each other again."

"Yeah, well, we'll have to take our chances," Vimes retorted. "Carrot, Angua, you get upstairs. Nobby and Fred, you take this level, and Cheery, you come with me."

"Where are we going, sir?" Cheery asked nervously. As she had averred before, she wasn't likely to be any good at all in a fight, which was precisely why Vimes was taking her with him--somebody had to keep an eye on her.

"_We _are going to find whoever's responsible for this," said Vimes, a glint in his eye that boded great ill for whoever that might be. "And then, in the patois of the _Times_, we're going to interrogate the bugger within an inch of his life."

They digested this. "I'm pretty sure the _Times _has never printed that particular phrase, sir," Carrot offered at last.

"Whatever. Let's move."

------

The witches, plus Albert, had shoved their way through the throng until they reached the roof. All of them were laden with bottles of Granny's potion, clanking and clattering like a small glass army. Granny had warned them not to let any of the bottles smash, but hadn't told them why, which made them all the more cautious--if Granny wasn't telling them what would happen, it _had _to be bad.

"What exactly is this stuff meant to do?" Agnes asked, setting her cargo carefully on the slate-covered roof. Perdita at least had enjoyed the trip up here--Agnes didn't often let her out, but her alter-ego was more than happy to kick and smack anyone unfortunate enough to get in her way.

"This castle doesn't actually exist," Granny said. "You saw that yourself--it's just a massive illusion. We're going to dispel it."

Nanny and Magrat shared a glance.

"Esme, not to be picky or anything, but we're on the _roof_," Nanny said. "We dispel the castle, it's gonna be one hard drop for us."

Granny waved a hand, apparently dismissing Nanny's words as an inconsequential side-effect. "We'll be fine," she said. "Though the poor sods below us might not be."

She didn't clarify that statement, and not even Albert dared press her. At her direction they placed the bottles at strategic intervals around the roof, making a rather drunken spiral that led out from the central chimney.

"Any particular time we're supposed to…set it off?" Agnes asked, rather nervously.

Granny smiled grimly. "Oh, I'll let you know," she said. "It shouldn't be long now."

------

Teatime winced at Susan's deliberate butchery of his name, but his eyes tracked every flickering movement of the sword she held. "Susan, difficult as it might be to believe, now is _not _a good time," he said, the words perfunctory and almost breathless. "Though if you could just see fit to lend me that--"

He lunged before he could finish the sentence, but Susan darted out of his way, taking a savage swipe at his head. Teatime ducked it with almost inhuman agility, launching himself at her and knocking her out the door and into the hallway, where she hit the floor with a dull _oof_.

"You know," he grunted, reaching for her sword hand "I've been very patient with you so far, but--" a wince and a fumble as her boot caught him in the shin "--you are really, _really_ starting to--ow--_get on my nerves._" He rolled, trying to pin her, but she was equal to that, her free hand seizing his hair and yanking as hard as she could. It was, she thought grimly, poetic justice--tit for tat, so to speak.

"Well," she returned, grimacing as his fingers tightened on her wrist like a vice, "it's nice to know I'm doing _something _right." Her heel met his calf just as her teeth sank into his arm, and with a howl he released her wrist. Before he could begin to retaliate the sword-hilt hit him full in the face, and with a kick a mule would have envied Susan booted him away from her, scrambling to her feet with the sword clenched in white-knuckled hands.

She glared at Teatime, a wild frizz of hair obscuring one hectically bright blue eye. "I want to talk to you, Teatime," she said, the words clipped and concise despite her labored breathing. "I want to talk to you _right up close_." She raised the sword, treating him to a grim, humorless smile.

Life and Delirium, who had been watching the exchange like spectators at a tennis match, glanced at one another, and then at Teatime.

"I'd run," Life suggested.

Running was an alien concept to Teatime, but in this case even his fractured brain realized that if he stood his ground he was going to wind up a very well-dressed Assassin-kebab. He considered this for perhaps half a second, and before Susan could blink he bolted, racing and weaving down to the crowded main corridors.

"_Dammit_," Susan hissed, and promptly took off after him, kicking her way through the melee and leaving a horde of fractured shins in her wake.

Life and Delirium again looked at each other

"She's gonna hurt somebody with that," Delirium said.

"I know."

"Should we follow them?"

"Why not? Hey, maybe there'll be cake."

------

After quite a bit of knee-kicking, elbow-bashing searching, Vimes had finally located the Patrician. Unfortunately, and Vimes didn't know how in hells he'd done it, Vetinari had located himself on the bottom tier of the chandelier, sitting with his usual composure between two truncheon-sized candles. The chandelier was one of those giant medieval affairs, all polished wood and heavy iron, and could easily have taken up all six of the Treacle Mine Road Watch House's cells combined.

"Hello, Commander," Vetinari said calmly, apparently unfazed by the mayhem below. "I did think you'd find a way in sooner or later."

Almost absently Vimes bashed a passing minion in the spleen, his eyes searching the ceiling for something--anything--Vetinari could have used to get up there. He thought sourly that the Patrician had probably turned himself into a bat--gods knew he did everything short of magic already.

"We're here to rescue you, sir," he said, realizing even as the words left his mouth how absurd they sounded.

Vetinari glanced at the running hordes, the smashed tables, the still-smoldering carpet.

"I must say, you've made a smashing job of it," he said dryly.

Vimes could _hear _his teeth grinding. "Hey, I--wait, did you just say 'smashing'?" he asked.

Vetinari shrugged. "I'm on holiday," he said. "I can say whatever I please."

"Not like you don't anyway," Vimes muttered. "All right, you need to get down from there--the lads and I can get you out of this mess." _Probably_, the more honest side of him added.

The Patrician looked around the room again, and Vimes, through his skyrocketing blood pressure, realized than the man was enjoying himself immensely.

"No, I don't think I'll be doing that just yet," Vetinari said. "I quite like the view from here."

No sooner had he spoken than Teatime burst into the hall, leaping with all the dexterity of a dancer onto one of the long tables and giggling like mad. Susan wasn't far behind, pummeling her way through the crowd by sheer brute force. She wasn't being careful with the sword, and several people fell to an inadvertent friendly stabbing--fortunately Life and Delirium were trailing in her wake, so the dead didn't remain dead for long.

"Oh, good grief," Vimes muttered, as Susan went barreling past him, but he didn't have a chance to say more--as soon as Susan had gone by, a huge grey tomcat leapt after her. At least, it _started _as a tomcat--before Vimes' astonished eyes, it morphed swiftly and seamlessly into a tall, muscled, very naked man, streaking--literally--through the throng like a pale, bare-assed arrow.

"…Gods, that was disturbing," he muttered, shaking his head. Unwilling or no, it was his job to get the Patrician out of here, and he had a feeling it was only going to get worse from here on out. He jumped out of the way as the Dean, his hat on fire, barreled on by, pursued closely by a toothless scullery maid with a dangerously lascivious glint in her one good eye.

Vimes shuddered. The chandelier's support-rope had to be around here somewhere--he'd drop the damn thing if he had to, and to hell with whoever (or, at this point, _whatever_) was underneath. The Patrician could damn well suffer a few bruises--if this kept going as it had started, Vetinari wasn't the only person Vimes was going to bruise, intentionally or not.

Vetinari watched him swim through the crowds, smiling a small, dry smile. He hadn't had this much fun in _years_.

------

Teatime, still giggling like the lunatic he so obviously was, ducked and wove his way through the melee, seemingly without effort. He was on his home turf now--well did he know the chase, even if this was the first time he'd been prey rather than hunter. It was certainly a novel experience, whatever else could be said of it.

He'd retained most of his knives, formal dress or no--he would have felt horribly wrong had he gone to his own wedding unarmed, and the fact that Susan was his intended bride only made him more wary. Mad as a hatter he might be, but he wasn't stupid--he knew she'd knock him off the first chance she got, and being his brain-broken self it was one of the things he liked about her. Unlike most of the people he'd met (many of whom he'd inhumed), she wasn't at all dull.

He didn't want to _kill _Susan--he still needed her as his queen, even if everything was going utterly to hell--and that presented him with rather a problem. Assassins were taught to kill, not capture, and until now the idea of even maiming had been utterly foreign to him. In Susan's case even maiming was almost out of the question--nothing he'd read said it was all right for a king to wound his future queen, and several books had outright forbidden the very idea. You could lock them up, but you weren't supposed to stab them.

Tricky problem though it was, he would probably have figured it out on his own, had not the Cupid (who was buzzing erratically, apparently suffering a truly spectacular concussion) loosed an arrow that, by pure happenstance, struck him directly in the forehead.

Teatime dropped like a stone, knife utterly forgotten, twitching slightly as he hit the table. Perhaps fortunately for him that meant he was temporarily out of Susan's line of sight, and thus avoided having his soul (and possibly his body; you never knew, with that sword) minced into chutney.

Susan all but halted, scanning the crowd with vision sharpened into unnatural clarity by sheer fury. Her quarry had disappeared--one moment she was following a head of fair curly hair, and the next all trace of it had vanished.

Most uncharacteristically she swore, inventively and at some length, hacking and kicking her way through the scrum once more. She stepped on Teatime but did not see him--she'd stepped on more than one person already, and was too busy hunting the throng to bother looking down.

"Sod it all, you little tit, where did you _go?" _she grumbled, punching the butler out of her way almost absently. No sooner had she spoken than narrative causality reared its nasty head again--Teatime, having regained his feet (thought not all of his balance) tapped her on the shoulder. When she didn't respond he tapped her again--still no response. Finally, frustrated, he seized her upper arms, spun her, and pulled her against him before she could blink, trapping her sword arm quite effectively between them.

Susan reeled, her guard momentarily shattered, but it only took about five seconds for her to gain equanimity and try to jerk away. Teatime, however, would have none of it, and his downright inhuman strength kept her ensnared.

"Let _go _of me," she said, the words almost--but not quite, because she _was_ Susan--a snarl. Her arm was well and truly stuck, rendering the sword as useless as a toothpick. Theoretically he could easily stab her in the back, but from the feel of it he wasn't holding a knife--just what the hell did he think he was doing?

"No, I don't think I'll be doing that," he said genially, and Susan only had a moment of red-misted fury before his mouth descended on hers.

------

Life and Delirium, both still high as kites, were poking and prodding their way through the battle. They'd lost sight of Susan, but that was all right--Life was more than busy, resurrecting people left and right. It was highly, highly doubtful either one of them realized they were in any danger, but even if they had it probably wouldn't have stopped them.

"Where's the _cake?_" Delirium asked, utterly oblivious to the chaos. "I wanted cake. The _butterflies _want cake."

Life didn't get a chance to respond. Somewhere, far at the back of the hall, a shriek went up that managed to pierce through even the din of battle.

"Shit! SHIT! Everybody RUN!"

The cry hadn't died away before the wall caved in, and…something…came trundling through. It was a little like a toboggan, but much more like a tank, sliding on greased runners across the marble floor. Covered in moss, with huge, cannon-like apertures lining it on all sides, it was positively swarming with Feegles, most of whom were sending up a cacophony of conflicting battle cries.

Atop it sat the Kelda, in all her spherical, blue-tattooed glory, a ceremonial spear in her hand.

"MUSH, YE SCURVY DOGS!" she bellowed--a surprisingly loud bellow, from a creature so small. The toboggan-tank rumbled onward, cutting a swath in the crowd as people frantically scrambled out of its way, and when it had gained the center of the hall it halted, gears grinding somewhere deep within it.

All sound and movement ceased, as every eye stared at the thing with a kind of horrified fascination. Nobody knew what the hell the thing was, or what it was meant for, but all who had prior experience with the Nac mac Feegle started edging quietly for the exits. For a moment dead silence reigned, and then,

"FIRE!" boomed the Kelda, and a split second later the tubes exploded, firing rounds that shot to the furthest corners of the hall. The din abruptly resumed, this time on a higher pitch, but it didn't take long to ascertain that the thing hadn't fired true shots--instead, half the crowd found themselves covered in sticky juice and bits of watermelon, with more than one person felled by a melon to the head.

Vimes stared. "And I thought Ankh-Morpork was bad," he muttered, shaking his head. A glance upward assured him that the Patrician was unhurt--and was probably the only person in all the hall who had escaped the sticky mortars--and then he was off, pushing and punching and occasionally blackjacking his way through the crowd.

"You want to play hard? Fine," he grumbled, heading for the stairs that led to the gallery that overlooked the main floor. The rope that supported the chandelier--a rope easily as big around as his waist--was fastened to a massive hook set high in the wall. If Vetinari didn't want to come down voluntarily, Vimes would happily take the decision out of his hands, and damn the consequences. He wanted _out _of this mess, the sooner the better, and if it meant dragging Vetinari by his boots, so be it. The fact that he had perhaps a snowball's chance in hell of dragging Vetinari _anywhere _against his will had rather escaped him.

"Bugger this for a game of soldiers," he said, and with that oath he raised his sword and started hacking at the rope.

------

Carrot and Angua, who were by then several floors away from the hall, nevertheless heard the explosion of the Feegle's contraption. They exchanged a glance that, while silent, nevertheless spoke volumes, and with that unspoken agreement raced back toward the hall.

They grabbed Nobby on the way, first relieving him of several small, rather valuable items and a jade statue of blind Justice. He'd found a silk petticoat somewhere (Angua didn't want to speculate why its owner had abandoned it), and lacking any way of carrying it had opted to wear it instead.

"I think that counts as being out of uniform, Nobby," she said, rolling her eyes at his protests. "Come on, the Commander will probably go spare if something's happened and we're not there to help."

"Sarge!" Nobby yelped, appealing to Colon for help. He got none--huffing and puffing, Colon was already trailing in Carrot and Angua's wake, as certain as they were that Vimes would flay them (probably not literally, but you never knew) if they didn't prod buttock back to the hall.

Their headlong flight accumulated more people--Justice, Famine, Pestilence, the Oh God, several seamstresses, War's daughter Clancy, Ridcully (who had been searching unsuccessfully for Albert), Ponder, and William de Word, who was too busy scribbling frantically to even notice he was being borne along by the tide.

Killer von Lipwig, ever-present cigarette to hand, followed the herd for the hell of it, certain that sooner or later they would provide some damn amusing theatre. Her deadly stiletto heels had already crippled more than one unfortunate, and when a bewildered, infatuated under-footman tried to grab her, one glare was enough to send him scrambling for cover.

By sheer accident she foregathered with Leonard of Quirm, who, like Life, was quite oblivious to the madness. Wisely realizing that he would have the life expectancy of a blowfly if left unattended, she seized his collar and dragged him after the rest of the mob, ignoring his token protests.

"Come on, Baldy," she said. "I don't know just what's going on here, but it's getting more ridiculous by the second."

"Well, well, look at it this way," Leonard replied, gazing about in utter fascination. "It probably can't get much worse."

No sooner had he spoken than the roof fell in.

------

The only person who _hadn't_ been distracted by the Feegle-ocalypse was Teatime, and that was mainly because he was otherwise occupied and therefore quite distracted. Or at least he was, until Susan kicked him in the shin hard enough to break even his concentration.

"Ow," he grumbled, giving her a reproachful glare. "What'd you do _that_ for?"

Susan, shaking with white-faced outrage, could not immediately form a coherent response. After a moment's spluttering she managed, "Why? _Why?_ You…you…"

She trailed off, knowing words were not even remotely adequate in this kind of situation. She stomped on his foot instead, her heavy boot coming down hard enough to make even him wince. "Just what the _hell_ do you think you're doing?" she demanded, the words fired on auto-pilot from a brain trying desperately to catch up with events. Cracked as he was, she'd thought he was smarter than that--he had to know her well enough to anticipate her reaction.

Teatime blinked at her, apparently genuinely puzzled by the question. "Why, kissing you," he said. "What, did I do it wrong?"

Did he do it--? Even cogent thought had failed her. Unless he'd been into some _really _interesting drugs, there was no reason his warped little mind should have hopped on that train of thought--

And then, abruptly, understanding and absolute horror dawned in tandem. It had almost entirely faded, but her fury-sharpened eyes caught the last fuzzy outline of an arrow sticking out of his shoulder.

A pink one.

"Oh," she said softly, "_bugger."_

Any response he might have made was, perhaps fortunately, interrupted by the truly spectacular roof cave-in. Despite the startled screams, what landed among the crowd was not solid stone--the castle, being mainly illusion, reverted to a sort of sticky ectoplasm when the spells that had created it were nullified. Those who had escaped the watermelon-shrapnel now wound up coated in goo, slipping and slithering like drunken ice-skaters.

_That _at least managed to distract both of them, albeit briefly. They stared, struggle momentarily forgotten, oblivious of the goop that was busily ruining their finery.

"…Right," Susan said, shaking her head. "Anyway…"

"Anyway," Teatime echoed, attention wandering back to the task at hand. He very likely would have kissed her again, save that Vetinari (who had, of course, escaped the fall of the chandelier unscathed) chose that moment to bash him over the head with what remained of a turkey.

"_Thank_ you," Susan said fervently, flexing her now-free sword arm. She knew it was horribly bad form to kill a man while he was down, so she nudged at him with her boot, trying to wake him up enough so she could stab him with a clean conscience.

"I do try," Vetinari said, unruffled as ever. "I thought you might need some assistance."

Susan shook her head, but she had barely opened her mouth to respond when Vetinari's expression abruptly changed, and with a speed that rivaled even Teatime he grabbed her arm and jerked her hard to the right. She staggered, wondering for a brief moment what he was trying to dodge--

--and then something horribly sharp slammed into the back of her neck, and she knew no more.

------

A/N: Yeah, it's going from bad to worse. XD


End file.
